After Mark Strand
“The world contains too much,
and, no matter how long you
live, there is never enough time.”
Even the magpie, pecking at trash
in the suffusive but disastrous light
of the early morning sun,
in a vacant part of the city,
in the ninth month of the year,
in what is collectively
supposed to be
the twenty-first century;
even this image will dissolve.
You are walking in the city
in that same morning and
you watch, mourning, as
things keep dissolving. As
though all the world’s
waters were sweeping
in; in tides of acid.
And you stand there
and you can’t understand it;
why the inhabitants of this small world
take it so seriously. And you watch
as their anguish is hurled
from sixth floor windows.
“And they are all just images,”
you say, speaking to no one.
“The magpie pecking at trash,
the skyscrapers threatening to topple over,
shaking their impotent fists. The
outcasts thrust to the city limits.
The bricks, the mortar, the tyres, the faucets:
the ambulance crews rushing to lost causes,
all are just images.”
And then, still standing there, you suddenly decide
that all you want or could ever need is someone
with beautiful hair
to turn to you in the onrushing darkness
and say “Yes, I agree too,
they are all just images,
nothing but images,”
but they never do.
Adam Lee lives and works as a bid writer in Manchester. Over the years he has studied 18th c. English Literature, Psychology and History. His poetry is largely concerned with time, death, loss, resurrection and renewal.