Frances Leviston

For Helen at the NPL

Behind her now the National History Museum Pocket Microscope she always screwed down to its farthest extension of nested rings, straining to focus

the peacock feather stolen from the dining room’s display of stiff dried flowers and fed forwards on to the stage, a blurred blue petrol and purple

fronding of fine barbules and barbicels netting white light, broken...

I hope you may have an electrical absence, as life never loses its startlingness, however assailed.

Emily Dickinson, letter to J.K. Chickering, autumn 1882

1.

Technologies – are not abrupt – Though Pole-vaults may appear – The lever bends a longer spell Than Morals – in a Fire

And clatters off the Bar before It ever clears the way – And makes the Mass...

From Chambord-pink at the base, it clears to where the upper curve reflects a skull-cap of charcoal, giving the earthʼs atmosphere in miniature: the sea, the air, then space. Erupting from that wavy cocktail is a white flower like a frozen whale-spout arrested mid-expulsion, a filigree fuchsia trumpet, petals peeling in a spray, bearing among them a bubble shaped like a long inverted...

In the cargo hold, cruising at thirty thousand feet above blue islands, galactically cold, I float between Oxford and the site where I was found

then traded on. I cannot see for bubble-wrap. At this stage in my repatriation I belong to no one, a blip, a birdy ounce in the undercarriage.

Only the curator knows I’ve gone, and who is left. She redesigns the tour: lizard bones replace me,...