Samuel Beckett’s Wrinkles
It starts with an untidy map
held within skin,
deep and heavy on the head
And becomes an avenue of this, a river of that
a crossroad, meeting between eyebrow
curved and bent beyond recognition;
A roundabout
at cheek and chin,
drawing the mouth into recess.
Eyes become unexplored terrain
while hair, always neater than the face
reaches for sky.
Libby Hart
Our Birth is but a Sleep
and a Forgetting
The man who believed
that televised weather forecasts
make it all happen:
the woman who did all her foreign travel
under a lemon tree
in her backyard, with an atlas:
the young man, faintly adventurous
who entered a maze and never came out,
leaving half a handkerchief behind:
the cabin attendant, or trolley-dolly,
afflicted by her entirely terrible
fear of heights:
the country butcher
whose father falling blind drunk
had been gobbled up by pigs:
the teenage girl whose main belief was
that, if she fell asleep, her legs
and arms could easily drop off:
the little boy who felt at night
the surrounding darkness
was all made of water:
and the chubby rose-pink baby
who had remembered it all
but now forgot.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe