TWO POEMS

North Walsham

In a hotel in a small town in Norfolk I am listening to someonethrowing glass bottles into a metal bin: toss-shatter, toss-shatter.There are no other sounds; it’s a quiet afternoonbut the one tossing them has a sense of rhythm and I havea sense that this has been going on for some very long time,time being that medium through which we conveythe least knowledge of our circumstances to God, or one another,which the body registers dimly in its cathedral of cells,its telomeres, its intrinsically photosensitive retinal gangliathat register the long days and longer nights of the blind.There is pilgrimage and then there is direct action of the hand,what Simone Weil called the “iron” at whose touch“there must be a feeling of separation from God such as Christexperienced, otherwise it is another God,” toss-shatter,the grasping and then relinquishing of the evidence of desire.