Poem
After Georgia O’Keeffe: Series 1 – From the Plains, 1919 and Back Door with Snow, 1955
‘The essential thing is what we always miss.’
Jorge Luis Borges
...Walking the streets, reading his books
in the cafés and bars, this was his over-
riding question: would he be liked in
prison?
He was not particularly bad, or good, or
graceful, or skeptical. He reckoned he
belonged to the median when it came to
the smokers of Lwów: but would he be
liked in prison?
I was the greatest art potter
but only I knew it,
photographing myself holding signs that read
Unequalled, Unrivalled, and Undisputed
We admire it because it disdains to destroy us:
beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
Chagall’s falling man, a grandfather clock, a yellow
cow with a blue violin populate an allegory of terror
The abandoned ship was there one morning – a new broken headland –
shiny, sitting high on the low tide, with hundreds of windows like
blinking oval spectacles. Over months the view became fractured;
someone dubbed it the Marie Celeste ‘beached at last’ and a group of us
Drone
Someone says drone and I see the cell phone it tracks, see the hand holding the cell phone
Being tracked by the drone, see the arm connected to the hand holding the cell phone
Being tracked by the drone, see the shoulder manoeuvring the arm connected to the hand
Holding the cell phone being tracked by the drone, see the person attached to the shoulder
Manoeuv ...
A horizontal twister, but none of the dramatic life
and drop of hellraiser rides. Sedate, but vertiginous
enough to rearrange conceptions, open perceptions
to a very different York – those eucalypt canopies
a blur of recognition shifting the boundaries
Rags of snow unmelting on the southern lawn.
Those younger ones, whose death turns
on the hair’s-breadth incidence of accident,
avoid this perduration of slow misrecognition.
The far city must make itself known
even here in the sitting room and
barred by winter branches. The skyline