Robert Verdon, #50, Starling Days

A taproot of lightning

shimmers

over low peaks,

vanishes into

after-image fragments …

I am

half-asleep at the wheel …

I heard of a man

(no horse’s arse I’m sure

unlike the Patriarch in Autumn)

who fell in love, severally, with

the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria,

and his name was not Columbus

but the vein in his neck was always distended

whenever he read about farm machinery …

the secret of such matters

like a brave new morning recalled years later

grows like a radish

and time

is its blotting paper.

I shall never remember this

unless I write it down …

In a hollow-bush year

when my city and I were smaller,

naïve, and lonely,

I,

with a starling flock

as my feathered air force

and no clearance from any Archangel,

had

an army of the empyrean

a grand murmuration

a week

to defend my own Pandemonium, an army

bright as Lucifer,

awful as God,

useful as a baby —

in a

warping

week metallic as mouth-blood,

I was carved up again,

like the mind by Single Vision,

or James Gilray’s plum pudding,

with rather more than a sixpence in it;

I hid inside

forgotten as a million springs before the Flood,

waiting for the inevitable seven days of Revolution,

as the world went over the handlebars.