Outside:
Sombre stone and glittering Douro.
Inside:
Ecstatic saints.
Rococo in Brazilian gold.
The rapture of a Moroccan massacre.
The rhapsody of Jesse’s tree.
A tangle of victimhood and victory.
Between:
A lunchtime rush for salvation.
Immortalising souls with disposable cameras.
Violence in their viewfinders.
Beneath:
The dead in boxes.
A destination to consider.
You serve no one by being small,
She says, as if we can trust police.
There are no cynics in her studio.
We rise, lock eyes and close them –
A flow filmed, what? Five years ago?
Two thousand and seventeen.
To think (though we should not be thinking)
That was before the rings, the dog, the limp,
The leak, the hole cut in the floor,
Before things I won’t go into,
History she has to live through,
Lithe Texan on the screen.
My Tao is taken from a textbook:
Spin ‘til you reach something
Approaching equilibrium.
She’d never recommend it,
But the physics work for me.
The week bucked,
flicking the rotoscope
from white cliffs
to ranked crosses.
Replacing the elephant
with a bleached
column of fossil,
churning silt.
A twisted shoe
preserved beneath glass
stamps the mind.
How to slip
this sorry piece
into the shining
mosaic of victory?
You declared day, naming sunrise
with strong singsong voice
offering the world
the whole waking world
and the prospect of
earning a dollar.
I roll the zoetrope back, gauging it
So cliffside cities sputter into acid sprays.
Crests of roadside poppies and oilseed rape
Run to the Rhodopes, gilding wide plains.