Robert Sheppard: Looking North 1 (re: History or Sleep, Selected Poems)

Here's another poem de-selected from History or Sleep, my forthcoming selected poems. It's a poem from 1987 and it appeared from Ship Of Fools as a folder with images by Patricia Farrell. Part or poem 2 will appear though. It was just a smigeon better than this one. So here it is, in its latest revised form.

Looking North 1

                        Brownswood Park, N4

                                                          for Patricia

Point seeing window frame

And house still standing
Dimensional tree scarlet of
Autumn stretches at its tips
Opinion in the branches
Moment caught trapping me
Back within its pointed eye
A mode of being out of the world
Takes this in eye drawn into
Its static statement a
Luxury a house with love
Of vision whatever is revealed of
The mind or of the world at this
Curved crossroad
                              we didn’t need
This for metaphor it is a metaphor
In a sliding change.

 

Of the fire escape passion drains

Showing where a spiral staircase
Might be sits the man who invented
For us to barely possess as it slips
Ahead feels it shut and runs
Sharper angled turns until on
The images that remain the news
Has produced has fallen from the
Reporting become a fact and focus
Roof tipping into audial consciousness
But hidden from view and off
Cut off no news from something
We’ve seen it is described
And used again and the man
Is the news and reports his own                                   
But the little that isn’t has no
Reason to be here at all.

 

Gliding to a hand upon your door

Advertising colour soaks
Into her sepia a dress torn
On its surface but never nakedness
For pure graffiti in your
Window white shoes geometries
And none remains skip catching the nuance
 
                                    this says
The thing over and over there’s
Message watch and desire
Will vanish from you
It is all hers you are
Lines points planes jump the
World turns over on its back
And she sings to you
Whenever you want to hear her.
 

 
The road crosses to its name

Recognise turning a corner on
The ‘wrong’ side to see how
Asian children having just passed
Turned to look at that turning
She turned bright pink carrying
A plastic bag of provisions another
Recogntion while cognition
Streaks forth and matches the
Eye jumping a line in
Dead centre the bedroom sashes
Brown walks straight as her long hair
Beckons as a home the road has snaked
These children make the road
Back where I started back in the world
Of decay and decadence this is moral.

 

On through the barrier on

Battered brick garden there
Two chairs dining table chairs
Colours showing stages of rebuilding
A wall that’s been kicked and hammered
The roofs were snowed with incompletion
Less repose what rests here is
The eye taking it in and re-
Ordering there is movement
And reversal and the feeling
Of an idea of a clash of ideas
That attempts to order the mind
In winter and the branches
Were (are) an interference to
That attempt to say it fail it all
And paint grown hard flakes
Always fails eye shut on the
Scene unseen eye open on the still
Surroundings and the breathing
Light…