He travels from town to town
with his apparatus;
a showman with wild white hair and incurious eyes,
he brings a touch of theatre to the lives
of squires and merchants, boys in love with death
and troubled girls who know this world is cruel
for reasons of their own.
Wherever he peddles his trade,
it’s always the same,
air pump and glass receiver, memento mori,
the flutter in the bowl just one more
instance of casual slaughter (tonight’s cockatoo
a rare and theatrical
flourish: more often he uses
some common or garden bird,
say a lark, or a sparrow).
While one hand works the pump, the other
hangs above the cover as the subject
struggles to stay alive,
a note of panic brightening the room
until the creature fades and what remains
is empty matter.
Lately, they’re all the rage,
these Pneumatical Engines,
amateurs build them at home, playing god for an hour,
owls in the deer park, a smatter of rain at the window,
the ticking of the clock, by which to time
the game of life and death:
I killed in the vacuum many
Animals that breath, as Birds, Mice, Rats,
Rabbets,
Cats;
some of them I recovered
by quickly giving them Air before
the Engine was quite exhausted;
but I never saw any revive,
that had been in a perfect vacuum.
One girl stares in fascinated
horror at the dying cockatoo;
another girl covers her eyes, while her father
points as if to say that grace will come
when the showman opens the vent – though grace delayed
is ever its own reward and, besides,
that well-dressed man in the foreground
is utterly rapt,
as is the boy
who might be his son and heir, their immaculate faces
half in the rouge-coloured shadows, their arms
akimbo, it seems, as they wait for the end to come:
but notwithstanding this hurt, the Lark
was very lively,
and did divers times spring up
to a good height.
The Vessel being hastily, but carefully closed,
the Pump was diligently plyed,
and the Bird for a while appeared lively enough;
but upon a greater Exsuction of the Air,
she began manifestly to droop
and appear sick,
and very soon after was taken
with as violent and irregular convulsions,
as are wont to be observed
in Poultry, when their heads are wrung off:
For the Bird threw her self over and over
two or three times,
and dyed with her Breast upward,
her Head downwards,
and her Neck awry.
The moon is full tonight, though we barely see it
up in the topmost corner, a sliver of cloud
bisecting it neatly, though nobody here can know
the world it illumines, the fox cubs crossing the lawn,
the owl floating out from the quincunx of elms in the park
and the silence that follows a kill, when everything stops,
that held breath over the land
till the dead move on.