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up-lifting as a lapwing cloud’s inside-outwardness, fugitive from harder weather, from winter in the ground that keeps us dormant, towards light that wakes us, leaking from the curtain, earlier and earlier, a sign to follow like a star to a miracle – crocus at the door, green washed through everything, that will hold its ground and grow, and somewhere birds already nesting without letting on anything is happening (god’s honour) betrayed only by a song. Opening-Time What is it to open time? The bolt drawn, the door unlocked and the barman poised to pour your poison of choice into the bottomless glass of the mirror behind him and the mirrors in the mirror where you see yourself receding, farther and farther through the course of the evening until at last time closes. 318
page 321
Night on the Heath What stalked through the Post Office? The weather’s foul again, ripping through the unnameable archipelago. And here am I, fumbling with truth, longing to unbutton, like Vladimir Holan, that time he drank Hamlet under the table, while history went falsely drawn past his window like the Vlatava river in flood. Who am I? Wandering the night, buttonholing ghosts, demanding to know what is the State without love? Living death. Cases alter circumstances. But power’s no ghost, as Hamlet learnt, struggling between past and present, old and new, the lot of all poets. How losers outnumber victors – just as the dead form the majority. Tell me what that might mean for democracy? A promotion for historians? A lifeline for gravediggers. It’s not so much who comes out on top as how. When at last I found him he said, ‘Whenever they tell me it’s all about family, I laugh. Life’s not short enough for that to hold its ground. Ask Hamlet and he came nowhere close at about the age of Christ.’ 319

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up-lifting as a lapwing cloud’s inside-outwardness, fugitive from harder weather, from winter in the ground that keeps us dormant, towards light that wakes us, leaking from the curtain, earlier and earlier, a sign to follow like a star to a miracle – crocus at the door, green washed through everything, that will hold its ground and grow, and somewhere birds already nesting without letting on anything is happening (god’s honour) betrayed only by a song. Opening-Time

What is it to open time? The bolt drawn, the door unlocked and the barman poised to pour your poison of choice into the bottomless glass of the mirror behind him and the mirrors in the mirror where you see yourself receding, farther and farther through the course of the evening until at last time closes.

318

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