wanting a message

If you want messages you must provide an orifice.
But to really want messages is itself an orifice,
a lesion, an interruption of the diurnal pact. The future
ferments in this cleft, packed with honour and disdain,
drawing us ever larger and further on, to this self-
same world, that listens; the rest is vain stuff.

Surely it is this whole particular, this action we
are that draws our sight into the funnel, opening
and closing as the light wing flutters, back
and forth, back and forth, wisdom and rubbish -
poetry is the flight. And now if I can just get out
of this notional claw I'll find exactly where I am.


--Peter Riley, from 'Ballad of the Broken Bridge' in Passing Measures: A Collection of Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), p. 16.