St Dogmaels
The Globemaker stands
with rows of still worlds
waiting to roll from the workshop.
She sets one spinning:
porpoises, guillemots,
a clattering of choughs
spilling into the sky
oceans of waves,
a merry hell of rattlesnakes.
Somewhere a god
tempting us to delirium.
And in a box, the stuff of reality –
the patchwork of history
sewn into a picnic
of well-worn stories
all these myths we keep moving
hand to hand,
thought to thought
before the spell breaks,
red, white shells scatter,
and the evolutionary ladder collapses
to way back before we were monkeys
costumes vanish, mammoth tusks
ammonites, all those saints shrunk up
kaleidoscoping inwards
sucked back one inside the other
dissolving into water
till it’s nothing but atoms, cells
a molecule of a tear on an eye
that miraculously
for one expanded moment
held the power
to imagine.