Originally published by Selkirk Lapwing Press in 2007, Andy Hopkins' acclaimed poetry collection, Dark Horse Pictures, is a deep, dark labyrinth of language.
When it is winter in the soul place
there is perfect complicity
nothing small breaks curfew
everything vast is taut
every sound has no cause and is the last sound.
When it is winter in the soul place
firs loom
wind has no influence
listen
listen to the bronchia of forest.
When it is winter in the soul place
the air sits
it just is
water chatters water words to moss
ditch pool bears the meniscus weight of heaven, like Atlas.
When it is winter in the soul place
rock is backlit
there is the brackish ghost of fox
nothing else has ever paused here
but hoofed things pass this way
when it is winter in the soul place.
Levee/Burgh-by-Sands
We achieve by the magnitude of small things. It all adds up.
All that is grandiose is hideous and infamous. There’s
failure in the vain, Roman clarity of a vast and sufficient
monument:
a bump on the purity
of pubic scrub, with its busts of grass;
this squelching mass of half-bricks and sheep muck
because. Because. Because
standing on the levee with a bitter fist and vista
of salt marsh, is a lesson: there is a way of things,
between the land and the sea,
Caesars. Caesars,
learn as your helicopters fall from the sky like hail. Caesars,
learn as your legions disappear into the murk of empire.
Caesars,
learn as the equal and opposite reaction crashes on the gates
of Rome; Caesars,
[a translation from silence]
you me same same
hand : hand
eye : eye
mouth : mouth
Mirrored,
or photocopied and folded
by the sun, two together.
Neither original or copy,
eyes watching eyes watching eyes
with open fun smiles.
But now we’re not the same:
we are simulacra,
each of us a parallel line on the page of the bed
and when we speak
we speak in opposite directions.
No same same,
same difference.
