the feathered hour

Max Ernst, Cage, Forest and Black Sun

Were it to have a name, it would be this: the feathered hour.

That tenuous, precarious moment when it may happen, despite the smallest probabilities, the disencounters, the forebodings.

In a parallel universe, in the realm of poetic possibilities - the enigma of suspension.

A 'maybe, maybe' that could be so...       or...

... lead us somewhere away from this shipwreck, if you weren't so numb with pain, or fear, or doubt, or delusion, or whatever it is I don't know. (And there is so much I don't know indeed.)

In any case, unable to move, to utter the words that matter, you scarecrow scaring away the birds.

Poems such as this are messages in a bottle I send to a stranger, whoever you are. Or is it the last bubble of oxygen I'm sending from under here?

Because there is nothing else I can do.

I know no other language outside this one that is not an empty shell, worn-out, oversimplifying, misunderstanding. Life, feelings are so much more complicated.

Words fail me thus. Because I'm in the water --

Not as yet drowning, but waving, waving.

*       *       *

The Cage

In the waking night
The forests have stopped growing
The shells are listening
The shadows in the pools turn grey
The pearls dissolve in the shadow
And I return to you

Your face is marked upon the clockface
My hands are beneath your hair
And if the time you mark sets free the birds
And if they fly away towards the forest
The hour will no longer be ours

Ours is the ornate birdcage
The brimming cup of water
The preface to the book
And all the clocks are ticking
All the dark rooms are moving
All the air's nerves are bare

Once flown
The feathered hour will not return
And I shall have gone away.


from David Gascoyne, Selected Poems (London: Enitharmon, 1994), p. 43.