The Instability of Perception

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.

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.