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The Jugglers
1
You walk down stone steps into a crowded square.
No-one turns at your approach. They stand in small groups,
chatting, laughing, waiting for a performance about to take place.
It turns out to be only a set of jugglers who throw their pins
over the nothingness of our lives, maiming the air with their cries.
2
The tricks they showed us looked cheap and flashy,
but they could be life-changing, we were told, if only
one understood their significance. But none of us ever did.
And that was the point perhaps. We watched them perform more
out of courtesy than anything else. Funny
how we can be conned into doing something
we don’t really want to do just to avoid giving offence. We believe
it’s just for a while, but it ends being a lifetime. And simply
because we believe there is no-one we can turn to
for an alternative vision.
3
When the show is over, the audience feel such passion
they decide to re-enact it. They themselves become the actors
or at least genuine copies of them.
4
It was past midnight. I was returning to my hotel.
I thought I was alone when I crossed the main square
but a man emerged from the shadows and took my hand.
He led me down alleyways to the banks of the river.
I fell asleep in his arms under the stars.
In the morning he was gone, but he left
the shape of his body in the grass.
5
Fingertips reach the tender inside
beyond mere greeting and passing away.
This breath on my face, on my trembling
shoulder blades, the small part of me
which is still open, left over from the wound,
the only place you can enter.
6
It isn’t me he’s after but my double, vanishing beside me
in the art of dying until he is no more than a fuzzy outline
on a hazy day in which the sun has become unbearably hot.
7
Now I’ve come to a door, but if I knock
it will lead to a series of commitments.
Like being caught in a maze
where one turning commits you to another
but you can’t find the exit
where someone – you don’t know who – is waiting.
8
I am sitting in the bus station writing a letter to you.
And then there you are in the sunlight in front of me.
‘But what are you doing in this country?’ I ask
almost as if I were disappointed to see you.
You smile with pained eyes.
‘I’ve crossed a continent to find you –
when will you embrace me?’
9
Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I asked you
in my dream, if we could meet again
and act as if our lives hadn’t taken place
since the last time?
But you said we needed to go beyond
regret into a kind of dance which in some
measure both contained and overcame that regret.
10
The road is made of stones and stories. It merges
with the light ahead. It has mapped
our dreams. How long shall we linger
on its verge, nursing our cut feet, gazing
with affection at old scars?
Ian Seed is the author of several collections of poetry and translation, the most recent of which are Scattering My Mother’s Ashes (Red Ceilings, 2024), Night Window (Shearsman Books, 2024), The Dice Cup (from the French of Max Jacob) (Wakefield Press, 2022), and Operations of Water (Knives, Forks & Spoons Press, 2020). His poetry and essays have appeared in number of anthologies, including Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom (MadHat Press, 2023), The Encounter: A Handbook of Poetic Practice (Parlor Press, 2022), and The Forward Book of Poetry 2017 (Faber & Faber). See www.ianseed.co.uk.
Copyright © 2024 by Ian Seed, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author
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