poetry – Page 96 – don't confuse the narrator

non-existent blue

giant fennel plants silhouetted against blue sky and clouds

Adaptation

I could show you a planet where creatures
walk upright on two legs. Seeing
a non-existent blue, they name it sky, and stretch
towards stale light in ignorance. Oblivious
to gravity which anchors them, they carve
each step through swirling gas as if a vacuum
and breathe in toxins unaware. Insular
as paramecia, they can’t converse
with any of the other untold tenant species
of their world. They know no other life.

(I don’t know when I wrote this, but it turned up recently among a set of pieces I’ve been trying to organise. It doesn’t seem to belong there, so perhaps it belongs here.)

notes for a poem

I went for a walk beside a canal the other day and hope eventually to write a poem about the swans I saw there.

Poems can take a long time to actually gel, though, so in the meantime, I’ll leave some preliminary notes here.
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thinking

Once again, the poetry cogs in my brain don’t seem to be turning very fast.

I wish I could believe that even when being unproductive my mind was as beautiful and as full of potential as the machinery in the photo.

misreading

I become more and more dependent on my glasses, but even when I am wearing them, letters dance on the page – and they do so even more when the text is on the screen.

The following sprang from a misreading of a perfectly normal expression:

Phrases of the moon

A single quotation mark
opens the discourse, which swells
to a full-mouthed ‘O’, then fades;
a silver comma follows, and then
silence.

a bee in her pocket

Last time I found a carpenter bee in my pocket, it was alive – at least until I stuck my hand in to find out what was in there and it stung me.

Today, though, the poor thing was already dead when I reached in thinking I must have left a tissue in my pocket when my jeans went in the wash.

I suppose if didn’t put my clothes on straight from the washing line, both of them might have lived, but who irons jeans?

The photo is only intended to give an idea of the size of the creature, and explain why, even desiccated in death, its bulk could be mistaken for a paper hanky. I put the keys there to give an idea of scale, and then remembered this old poem:
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