Ian SEED

AUTHENTIC LIFE

Not the name, but the walk down to the river, a wish unspoken. In
place of a flowchart, a tapestry rolls down before uncomprehending
workers. In this room you are suddenly older. Something you're afraid
to speak of. Bleeding from the nose at the moment you arrive. So many
true versions of the same thing. Drinking from a tap whose water
tastes of rust.




CHARCOAL WING

Sealed for the next of kin. The writing is on the sea, not always out
there, but here in a way not previously considered. A table bare of
sounds, the crowd dispersed. The question of bartering raised, we
wasted too much time wondering where the fine line was between the
two. A metaphysical delight was taken in uncharacteristic kindness,
the old partisan back in the hills. Yet it was our lives they haggled
over as night folded around us. Your last-minute gesture was a useless
parenthesis, brackets being the safest place.




I THAT WAS NEAR YOUR HEART

All the faces gone. Is it this you wanted? The whispered words you
can't catch, the business of angels pressing near you? And the whirl
of a face, Christ bent to a new position, truth without a dwelling.
Still she moans in her sleep, holds your hand to her belly, anointed
in a deed unplanned. All sides lose credence, the old ritual dried at
source, malleable for the first time in defeat. But a sense of it
strikes for the first time. Fingers delicately intervene. The look in
a cow's eyes as she drinks from the river at dusk. Only a few miles
from home.




AROUND THE POLISHED TABLE

The subject torn from the main stub, descended in a semblance of
another dimension, a closed deed knowingly to dissuade us from a print
of permanence, curbed and cultivated to please the next winner, a
plague of insiders pulled out for inspection,
diminished beyond recognition, lives interwoven for this moment, a
tune to bear combed from an array of sources, no one's business to believe any more.




A KIND OF WING

Abandoned clothes, hanging from branches in the forest, offer
possibilities, though not the kind you want. A sky opens its arms
down. Nice fumblings. We were out for a while, caught in the gap,
folded, taken out of context to be handed over to a stranger, conned
out of a sky too blue to be forsaken. Fog lies down, a real treat;
day, in no hurry, runs out of looks. All kinds of devil sneak their
way in. The finding is well, though unexpected, the next place
exclusive and out-of-bounds. You take accurate notes of several false
leads, hang truth together from stray threads.




THE ONLY ONE AWAKE

You talk to yourself out loud, like your father in his youth, a mark
of recognition, a baptism. How will you get in touch now? It is
already morning yet still dark. You listen to the crackle of rain from
your bed. Your hand reaches into the emptiness. You have just come to
an understanding. A little time more and it will be done. We walk
through the forest in silence, as if the other did not exist, the
right way a nomad's journey.



back