Robert Verdon, #297, Limbo (1st draft)

Every plant and pebble I inspect through a field lens

Inherited from my father

I do my own food-tasting

They keep the world

as their sandpit

Their cesspit

Shaky as a new-born foal

I live in a doll’s house

Like a university hostel

A series of airy coffins

Tiny rooms

Tiny lives

But what is space?

And time?

A cosmos in bubble-wrap?

Looking for a professor in a grey gown in a high forest

As lightning strikes farther up

S/he has gone mad

S/he has a habit of wood-carving and plays the treble recorder

And the sitar at the larger shopping centres

And dreams of bass viols and reviving the Holy Roman Empire

S/he has new knowledge of space and time and something else besides

They want to know what it is

We have to find our professor first

It is like a novel I may one day write

The leading character is blind

No one will publish it but I do not care

I will print and bind it myself and booby-trap each copy

And send one to them

Lone-wolf terror from one barely a deist

Swearing allegiance to a paperbark flag

Torn up inside like a discarded airliner

In my house is sheet lightning

Preserved under red crab shell

And I lie next to my grandmother

In Bega Flats that stand yet near Glebe Park where I once planted an acorn

My memories are filed according to a strange system I still do not understand

Surprise is of the essence

Craziness is not so attractive in the slack-faced old

I wish I had become an inventor or an electrician

Or even a lawyer and retired early with money

Dogs bark, all is well tonight, copious clouds will dispel frost

No more uncomfortable realisations at dewpoint of plants and cats left out while I wake

snuggled up to a cheap hot-water bottle at 4.30

I could live to be a hundred that way

On my ceiling the sheets come off

I could get lost in the forest in a grey gown with the secrets of the universe

They would never find me

They would not care

My closest friend says reading can keep your mind away from grief

I have read the little-known poems of James Joyce

And Porter’s ‛The Easiest Room in Hell’

And live constantly in Limbo myself

With more black notes in my head

Than ‛Aubade’ by Philip Larkin.

Every plant and pebble I inspect through a field lens

Inherited from my father

I do my own food-tasting

They keep the world.