Issue 30: Maurice Scully

ON LOCATION

Some time around 500 millions years ago

green algae began to move out of shallow

fresh waters onto land, harvesting sunlight,

fastening on rock, mud.  The question was –

scale, that delicate glass bridge in the dark,

packed tight & eating into the vulnerable

underbelly roots gripping disfigured interstice,

sun through glass, steel, porch, ceiling, come

live with me & be my/I wonder how you are?

A page turns. It’s the 16th . Networks of connecting

energies, a plastic bag, a shopping list, strength

of spirit, hunter, farmer, bureaucrat, all of our

little history, ‘going forward’. Which you were

probably saving for breakfast. Streets shimmer

in the heat here & melt along bright house walls,

a rippled stream through the village & tar flows

down the base of streetlight poles, stark blacks

& blinding whites, diagonals, a single thread, foot-

steps moving in the dark, measured in units of

poise. And batten down the hatches. Hit shal be

expedient that a noble mannes sonne in his infancie 

have with hym continually onely such as may accustome

hym by little & little to speak pure & elegant latin.

FROM HERE

Now this crumb

on this plate

now

this blueberry

design on its

ceramic

plane 

now the

napkin beside it

still

its paper

indentations

stopped in

lines in light

now

these strange

things teem –

now all that:

a single drop

dictating its

little joke

several times

in time back

past back

O

into I then

around it

out again

step facing

glimmering

points each

side the bay

in the dark.

Mechanical

blasts from

an ice-cream

van’s ad-music

crinkle into

open air –

a blackbird

then a white

carefully

moving

forward

retreating with

great care

brings you

emphatically

now that

you’re

old enough

to know

brings you

drawing

yr horns

in –

gapped

glistening

trail –

crumbling

skill sets –

to the edge of a new

leaf succulent in

the clay bed.

Passion flower’s

toxic leaves

the Zebra Longwing

butterfly can handle

harvesting

&

re

configuring

the poison

to make its

own sweet body

not so sweet

for birds to eat

while the vine

responds in turn

producing stipules

that mimic the

insect’s eggs dis-

couraging infestation.

On the back

of each leaf

too

where each

‘false egg’ is fixed

a nectar-producing

gland

attracts

ants & wasps

which attack

the Longwing’s 

caterpillars

& so … around

we go

this plate

this blueberry design

this morning

in a circular

two-step evolving –

however fixed it may seem

to you to be for now

but no – evolving.

The fly’s life

is not short

to the fly

& it’s

packed

with incident.

The bird

is alert

to everything.

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