Sunday, 30 October 2016

Aditi Machado: The Animal



To the place he will sit down to die,
his quiet broken by a distant bell
held in the hands of a boy:

this is where I go, as if
to an attic; this is where I expect
it will happen, amid a vatic breeze
in the grass in the sun
surrendering itself to a wound,

and the coming to a place
is sometimes enough, and even more
is the coming to it as sheep
from a point to the far right
with a boy and a gathering
sound of bell, from within
a thick of pine: this coming,
from a nowhere, upon a beast:

the white of sheep invades a field
as a circle might empty wildly
into another circle.


Published 2012. To me this reads like a chain of thought crying out for a more formal structure, even if that would need a rightness of wording at a very high level. But even in this looser form there's a drama emerging as it were from a mist.

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