Portrait of Edward James, 1937
What does the left hand, the sinister, conceal?
Why, with the right, do you touch the solid world,
the wooden material that protects you,
like the claw of a bird that doesn’t sink into
the flat world, made by branches?
It’s all so dark and inhospitable. Half-hidden,
the gold of a cuff-link that reveals you
and the elegant cut of your suit
that betrays your rank in society.
And you, the whole of you, the dazzling light of success,
you burn with the pure spirit of the eternal present:
the powerful intensity that others see,
that they want you to be, want to be yours,
and you give back to them that shining world
they had dreamed of experiencing as their own,
and of which the clear image of your name –
of their past, of your future – is the proof.
They all want to be the hard rock at the bottom
of an engulfed layer of basal crust, or gold-bearing stone
of many carats that a river in spate carries
downsteam, with no dam.
And we are
the meteorites which an explosion among the stars
has spat out into the galaxy and many millennia
have worn away space into pure dust,
and have fallen by chance into life,
at the side of a road.
Here is one of them.