Friday 25 November 2011

Oliver Dixon - Proses for Hal Incandenza (6)

VI
Prolonged sobriety – it turns out – is the strangest high of them all. Waking straight and staring out at roof-tops and satellite-dishes, first symptoms of autumn on the uppermost plane-leaves, stoned wasps pottering between them as if lost: it’s all here, if you want it, things are exactly as they seem. The barest facts hold true. The bald mechanic mooching past keeps throwing his keys up and catching them again like some tiny clinking instrument; there’s a ceremony inherent in the mundanest gesture today, the rhythm upholds us if we let it.
     There’s a pause between the simmer in the plane-leaves and the second you feel the first scraps of rain begin to wetten your arms and hands, a barely-perceptible hiatus: the moment opens if you listen for it, a mouth about to speak; it receives you in the downpour as you move through.

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Oliver Dixon is a poet and writer based in West London whose poems and reviews have appeared in PN Review, the London Magazine, The Wolf, Frogmore Papers, Blackbox Manifold and other places. His first volume of poems is forthcoming from Penned in the Margins. He blogs at Ictus, and his day-job is as a college lecturer working with students with learning disabilities.

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