Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Saving
- Out of this World
- Observatory
- Zentralfriedhof
- How to Remember
- Europe
- What's Gone Blue
- Plain Tongues
- As the Crow Flies the Sun Rips Day Open
- Boy
- The Roof
- Eva Braun in Linz
- Yellow
- My Girl in California
- St Peter
- The Soldiers
- Palace
- Outside Vienna
- Neutral Air
- Woman
- How to Forget
- The Sound
- In Time
- The Lever
- Fourteen Mistakes
- The Fall
- The Hold I Have
- Centre Strange
- Born Breathing
- The Heads
- Home
- Epilogue
- Maker
- Acknowledgements
The Heads
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Saving
- Out of this World
- Observatory
- Zentralfriedhof
- How to Remember
- Europe
- What's Gone Blue
- Plain Tongues
- As the Crow Flies the Sun Rips Day Open
- Boy
- The Roof
- Eva Braun in Linz
- Yellow
- My Girl in California
- St Peter
- The Soldiers
- Palace
- Outside Vienna
- Neutral Air
- Woman
- How to Forget
- The Sound
- In Time
- The Lever
- Fourteen Mistakes
- The Fall
- The Hold I Have
- Centre Strange
- Born Breathing
- The Heads
- Home
- Epilogue
- Maker
- Acknowledgements
Summary
At the heads the waves crash rage at rocks and you watch,
you stretch your attention like it can't snap.
There are songs stuck in you that you might hum when your
light's snuffed, when your tree's cut, neck's split.
When the metaphors eat the real.
But how will you sing when your brain's gone? Here's how;
when you die, don't think of the mind, but feel how your
body is.
For if creasing's strange, why not uncreasing.
Why not chrysalis.
Why not as your brain discovers second childhood, your body
forgets its markings too.
Why not bonelessness can mumble song.
I've not thought to ask if heaven has seasons or how I might
be cured of my need for new, but in my city the sun has come
out for the first time in weeks and it knows how long since
I've spoken to a man or woman.
And it says you must go and find some park bench with a
plaque to a local who loved the sparrows, and you must carve
their name into a napkin and let it go in the wind.
You cannot mourn all the dead, it says.
You must let them go one by one.
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- Information
- Nowhere Nearer , pp. 46Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018