The Wave Hennets: Shadows
WHAT I TAKE TO BE IS
Where the shadows are moving over the car,
nothing like leaves is moving, but I can see
the leaves, nevertheless. But the shadows are
able to tell me the slope of the car's roof
if I note how they stretch. What I take to be
is. Should my preference be to look for proof
of the state of the sky, then the degree to
which all the edges were blurred would be my node
of attention, to mark whether cloud or blue
sky was surrounding the sun. Vision's a code
that gives answers. Interpreting is the task,
but it's you who decides what questions to ask.
CHIAROSCURO
Call it 'chiaroscuro', Shadows alone
mark out the object. Letters spring out at you
that are made out of nothing. Doorways are shown
where all the light is denied. Where a nose hides
someone's cheek shows the nose. On the floor you view
abstracts in black and white that the eye decides
are but ordinary tables and chairs; and moon
craters turn inside out on the photograph
if you look at it upside down; and at noon,
deep in the summer, all the shadows are half
of the world and are black, and blind the seeing.
Making binaries prior shadows being.
THE RELATIVITY OF SHADOWS
Not the shadow that moves round the sundial:
no — it's the sundial that's moving with the Earth.
All the shadows across the city square, while
we plot our courses across it, diligent
as this clerk clasping briefcase, its contents worth
thousands in futures if caught in the present,
or as vague as these tourists consulting their
map automatically, or chasing around
what their fancies can fling like these unaware
children, or wrecked on a bench like this runaground
wino, these shadows here, unchanging, extend
as we rush on in space and time to our end.
SHADOW-RHYTHM
As I cycle along down the avenue,
sun to the left, I am passing through shadows
that are cast by the tree-trunks. Over my view
rhythmically flickers a change in the whole scene:
colours bright as my eyes are shaded — grass glows,
lit from within; cars are technicolored clean;
in an instant the trees become an arcade
festival-paperchained; people are painted
by Impressionists. But it's gone — out of shade,
dazzled, the eyes see a bleached world: acquainted
with the over-exposed film of depression.
My sight jolts back and forth in harsh succession.
YOUR SHADOW
There's a shadow on stilts on the frosted snow,
elbows and knees like tongs. It dowses the frost-
glints and lets them ignite again. It will go
scissoring over the drifts, bending in stiff,
sudden, headless politeness, dusted or glossed
whatever wind chooses. Sidelong hieroglyphic
on Egyptian frieze, coding time and angle.
Here it will startle, leaning close at a wall:
there it dwindles away into the tangle
hedges present. On the wide ice it grows tall,
but it shrinks in the distance, a self outspread
that is nothing but bold legs and tiny head.
SHADOWS
All the shadows are sundials. They mark what they
miss, keeping time in time. See their cast in dust,
beams of dark that are held though the motes at play
spark from existence to nothing. From the tree
a long print is extruded that must adjust
over whatever it falls upon, a key
to the tree and the ground at once, silhouette
snipped to the picture of both. See the dark shrink
in the noon and the summer, tree a rosette
offering shade: but as the suns rise or sink,
hover winter-low, shadows extend the gloom
and are flung horizontal on grass or tomb.
SHADOWS OF SEAGULLS
Up the wall go the shadows of seagulls, black
flittering ghosts, that are flapping from nothing
at one edge into sudden existence and then back,
quite as unnervingly, into empty sky.
All the energy's there, the pressured rushing
on to the end, all the craft with which they fly,
the aspiring, the gliding, the wrist-wrestling
with winds, but they also do cleverer things:
can distort to a window's shape, there sloughing
off all the grime of the bricks with spectral wings.
They have gone now. The sun is bare on the wall,
as if they had not flown across it at all.