a parenthesis in need of a transfusion

It's hardly begun and I'm already up to here with it.

Sapped, drained, on the verge of inarticulacy. Barely staying afloat.

As the night falls there's little more to do than read this poem, that poem, snuffling for the last vestiges of meaning.

Holding the line.

(When, when will I be able to close this deadly, unbearable parenthesis?...

*       *       *

Solitude

The blue bite from the apple. Broken days
arrive like ships in the garden,
invested with date-line amnesia
they are a part of disinformation,
they happened, but they flew black flags
from rusty funnels. I pat their fat hulls
and watch foliage fill their empty decks.
They'll push off deeper into the forest

and be a scaffolding for birds, squirrels.
Solitude's like searching in old pockets
for a dead letter. When I touch the air
I'm startled by myself. This blue, that blue

are seamless and in harmony.
If I go backwards, there's another place,
a room inside this room inside this room.
I'm no one sitting in that space.
A black coat hanging from a chair.
A parenthesis in need of a transfusion.

I listen to the silence fall
like snow. It's white on white, clear abstract stuff.
I'll walk out later, try the street
for faces, leave the garden piled with ships
and three small children sitting on the wall.

--Jeremy Reed, in Conductors of Chaos, ed. Iain Sinclair (London: Picador, 1996), p. 363.