The Instability of Perception
by Theodore Simmons | November 27, 2017
We went looking
We went looking for permanence,
all around the edges of the graves,
Inside our mouths, between tongue
and cheek; some fine seriousness.
The falling leaves
turned away on the wind,
We heard only whispers,
though they shouted all together
All brawled out, rotting in the gutters.
Those edges we watched, effervescent, lit up
round stone circles and car windscreens and why?
Did it mean a whole lot?
Through fields of our memory lambs
flee like ghosts. Cliche, Pythagoras,
The circumference spinning wide,
pinned, now, by this quarrel of light.
Goodbye time
Don’t pretend you won’t watch when that gargoyle
grins so hard to be in the picture and my
mother dies. The view’s not much but what is it like?
The canals, clogged and dying, might disappoint us
but you won’t know.
Maybe you’ll see the churches still rolling
their stone leaves, high fluted with grandeur,
Plastered like old geishas they know where the bodies
are buried. Right there. Children, five metres deep.
The infant Christ hanging overhead, all smiles.
Photo credit: Pexels – modified.