Poetry from The Literary Review



Terra Infirma

Rod Mengham



The lights get carried away in this journey to the burying-ground by the harbour,
where a necrotising linctus covers the eye. Off to the right,
Seurat's bathers are gradually de-pixellated. To the left is a seething weir.
Beyond the vanishing point, under reflecting oil, the dithering stems of
angler fish begin to shine.

In a closed wing of the gallery are the specialists in mis-colouration, the
architect of the Blue Wolf and the Master of Female Half-Lengths,
whose ruined torsos break the surface of the painting like foundation
stones in the shallows, frost burning the extremities night after night.

To pass through the looking-glass either to lose time or to gain time is to
change places with a detective dusting for finger-prints between mirror
and mercury. This is the sanity of the body that ever answers to our call
but does not show that it hears only the gushing stream drowning slow-
ly the siren songs we thought to ignore.

Acting the part for which he became famous much later on, the artist
secured his image in a dying cascade of photons by packing the abyss
with an infill of carbonized grain. They performed the arrest when a lost
masterpiece began to ooze from the stones of the arcade. The memory
of its pigment was a balm and a comfort.

The creatures of the deep are everywhere except straight ahead, hyphens
bringing darkness to its destination, soured by invisible rains.

I took the first watch, knowing it would not flower until the thought of
a single tail-feather should slow down the rate of decay. It is not known
for certain when the mists began to form. An end to this coshery.