Classic Poem

Back of the mind, it’s the white sliver which is
neither misty trace nor meaningless: it probably
isn’t snow, nor that glare effect of a white line
which the sea’s horizon can sometimes have
on days when the air’s clear as untouched cellophane.
It’s a particular white sliver, or smear of white,
like a patch of sand bursting through leaf-cover,
held forever, remembered, from some walk years back.
It’s the stripe of light on sandhills towards dusk,
caught just once, recalled, seen again somewhere else.
Or it’s untouchable shadow on the white metal of the roof
of the house next door, a shadow that’s also a silhouette
of a bougainvillea, cascading red flowers
down the walls, overgrown round the drain pipes -
and, above the roof, three pelicans hanging in the sky
as if they’re boats moored in wind-slopped water.

This is the brightness I usually wake up to, or
which wakes me, after a night of dreamless sleep.
I slept like that last night. After weeks away,
I wake up once again in a house tranquil as summer,
a house full of things (lamps, sinks, chairs, doors)
which do not need to sleep. Just for those first
few moments, after I’ve come into the kitchen,
everything’s as calm and cool as the fridge.
Then it hums, quietly, and the lazy, gliding pelicans
flap their wings. It could be once or for ever,
like a particular sensation which arrives and goes,
before it’s anchored, then felt again. Getting back,
I’ve that feeling that somehow things
have changed, when really they haven’t:
perhaps they should have changed. They haven’t.
You’re still asleep. The neighbour’s roof offers
back a little ultraviolet to the unsmudged blue,
while I’m thinking of the time away, the journeys,
the days and days on arid, high-speed roads.
It could be you’re dreaming of it right this moment, curled over
like a slope of land. Nothing changes. Or perhaps it’s country light
that’s burned itself behind my eyes. Now the trace
becomes that sliver. Like a shadow getting through
the lids, I remember spilt-out glaze on flooded wetlands
with their dead, grey trees still standing there
and ibis cruising down to land. A string of fence posts
wades into the water’s middle, before it drowns. Up close,
two swallows, scissoring, vanish across the sun.