Spread out, O way out and flying
in the blued ellipse of going existence
where only camera-crews and murderers come,
we assume, I think, that you do not know
that the world is not young – that Caesar is dead,
and Napoleon, and Thomas Newcomen –
that to you they might as well be yet
to be born, to live – and the eery silence
where the migratory batwing of fish
once passed across your brow
like a wet cloth pressed by your mother
to the fever of hunger, O gull,
is registered by you only as a glitch
in your consciousness, that program, meagre fry.
Though we might conceive, I guess
(like an American), or suppose,
that the microplastics fletched in your gut
are vaguely known at some suboptimal level of displeasure –
just as the grains of plastic grinding in my balls
might account for this taste of saltpetre
on my lying, elegiac tongue.
O gull – gull gull –
sometimes I look into the eyes of animals
and the kaleidoscope, it doth turn
to a world in which I walk naked
through the stalls and circle
of frogs and nightingales
who understand exactly what we’re doing,
and have done; who talk past our ears and faces
of its scarcely believable continuance
in the face of all evidence –
and though some raise spectres
of Brutus and Cassius
they not only know them not to be possible,
consolatory fantasies, but their hearts
cannot commit towards their children
such a hatred – and so instead they call
constantly, hopelessly to us, the original
unsecret names we’ve forgotten
or choose to forget. And in the blue beyond
and sizeless ballrooms of the Atlantic
the gull describes a careful pirouette
that will crumble, was made to, as soon as made;
though not before it’s drawn a rolling tear
from the bowed head of the gagged and handcuffed god
who watches this, shaking with grief,
and a cancer that’s utopian to itself.
in the blued ellipse of going existence
where only camera-crews and murderers come,
we assume, I think, that you do not know
that the world is not young – that Caesar is dead,
and Napoleon, and Thomas Newcomen –
that to you they might as well be yet
to be born, to live – and the eery silence
where the migratory batwing of fish
once passed across your brow
like a wet cloth pressed by your mother
to the fever of hunger, O gull,
is registered by you only as a glitch
in your consciousness, that program, meagre fry.
Though we might conceive, I guess
(like an American), or suppose,
that the microplastics fletched in your gut
are vaguely known at some suboptimal level of displeasure –
just as the grains of plastic grinding in my balls
might account for this taste of saltpetre
on my lying, elegiac tongue.
O gull – gull gull –
sometimes I look into the eyes of animals
and the kaleidoscope, it doth turn
to a world in which I walk naked
through the stalls and circle
of frogs and nightingales
who understand exactly what we’re doing,
and have done; who talk past our ears and faces
of its scarcely believable continuance
in the face of all evidence –
and though some raise spectres
of Brutus and Cassius
they not only know them not to be possible,
consolatory fantasies, but their hearts
cannot commit towards their children
such a hatred – and so instead they call
constantly, hopelessly to us, the original
unsecret names we’ve forgotten
or choose to forget. And in the blue beyond
and sizeless ballrooms of the Atlantic
the gull describes a careful pirouette
that will crumble, was made to, as soon as made;
though not before it’s drawn a rolling tear
from the bowed head of the gagged and handcuffed god
who watches this, shaking with grief,
and a cancer that’s utopian to itself.
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David Sergeant has published two collections and a pamphlet of poetry, as well as two books of literary criticism, and his work has appeared in The Guardian, Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland, the Forward Book of Poetry, and elsewhere. He currently lives and works in Devon, England.
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