Paul Batchelor’s new collection, The Acts of Oblivion, will be published next month.
i.m. Derek Mahon
We value them, the voicesthat need us least, who speakwith honest subtletyto ironies beyond us,who slip our grasp and gowhistling down endlesscelestial colonnadesof – no, not astral planeswhere the dream-soul wanders,but airport corridors,bus stations, the Gare du Nord,a beach house in Goa,testing posteritywith promises to break.
Who wouldn’t picture...
Just as, after the affair, when I knew I was in the clear but came down with trismus of all things and had, needs must, to post the ‘finest sashimi in Brooklyn’ through the half-inch letterbox between my upper & my lower incisors poking it in there with the chopsticks yearning to contribute in a non-confrontational way to Miss X & her sister & her...
Sighs & groans. As it crawls to a standstill the train becomes a fortress.
Outside: pitiless silence. Emptied sky. Snowbound farms. Ever-deepening blue.
The vulnerable economies of owl & fox. Fields brushed, as by a comet’s tail, with winter.
No announcement. No sign of the guard. We have reached the threshold, it is everywhere at once
in depthless white drifts unbroken...
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