From The Pearl Works
Little Yang Sing, Yuzu, Hunan, Wong Wong, Imperial Siam:
all those bright syllables cascading into the bottle-bank at 5 a.m.
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Spring. We get it.
After weeks on ice, buckets of pussy willow outside Woo Sang blossom & each evening is granted a little extra credit.
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This is the goose-egg symbol of perfection that your perfectly pursed little lips mouthed in my direction, darling, many many moons ago.
O . . .
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And this? The handful of coppers daylight borrows from October.
Come bright hour. Be bright. Be ours. Be extra, ecstatic, immaterial, other.
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Glory be the carnal surface:
aluminium on flats across, blasted lime by late sun; the water cooler’s translucence, a still p.m. in the office.
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Friggin’ Wigan pier! Nada here, zilch, squat, divil the peep . . .
‘The point’s the road to Wigan pier,’ she’s giggling, ‘not the pier.’ Deep.
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Herewith my current credo: all pastoral is virtual, ever was & shall be, world without end . . . Boom!
This day of our lord I glimpsed into the server room.
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I sleep in my daughter’s bed one night, I sleep in my son’s the next.
I pray that I will wake each morning to azure, to absolution, to text.
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I toast my new age. I drink its tongue-roll, its wheel-whirr, on the road to Montecarlo.
Quarantaquattro, quarantaquattro, quarantaquattro . . .
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Grazie Signore for ordinary time, for this privilege of sound & light,
for bricks & stones that hold its heat after the sun has been & set.
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Glory be this glare, this solar self, this blanched out screen.
Glory be its tangerine charging me all afternoon. Glory be its indoor green.
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Grazie Signore for this fathomless astronomical fluke of landing here at all,
for the full circle that we’ve come, the blast it’s been, the ball . . .
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O slow coach, freeze-mode yellow solar yoyo O hand-thrown old gold snow globe
O rose most blown O whole whorled ‘out there’ lodestar de l’aube
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O glory hole l’aurore O bowl-of-cored-sloes stone-cold low glow
O homophone O grown son showboating solo over our known world so moments ago
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O heliotrope O blossom bole O trompe l’oeil orange grove we home in
O old soul, no bones glowworm without whose strobe we’d mope eternal gloaming
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O closing words O lovely hopeless song (one more!) invoking love gone south
O storeroom door that’s on a slope & opens outwards O open mouth
by Conor O'Callaghan
from The Sun King
Gallery Press, Oldcastle, 2013