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From "Lines out of Space"


delving delving

where is everyone how have we been vacated
brother come in from the field of announcements
another season must remain on your desperate heads
and yet we exist and yet we still exist

all this is little more than delving delving
fiddling and perverting the course as
a matter of course and while the quarry escaped the
chisel still your heart can gouge there

the haunting chimes of scaffold props
cried come on down the road and see
the ineffable is still abroad vital and
handsome in the rotten coves of ealing

cousin I say lay down your crop of excuses
and sister tell our aunt not to sow
the seeds of predictions and limping arrivals
all that will be here is here now and that will be all

what’s this you ask why that is nothing
little more than delving delving and casting and
wait there is one verb more which we’ve held on to
it will support and yet confound us and

as we huddle and hug our knees and scratch our chins
the blown-out curtains mistaken for the
single missing thing the other piece that never would complete
us tells of how I came to hate the chiming
harrowing and plaintive at the hind leg of the day

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