the most beautiful experiment

... is this. This way of seeing things is what I would like my students to learn, by un-learning all the rest.


Salts work their way
to the outside of a plant pot
and dry white.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . This encrustation
is the only image.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The rest -
the entire winter, if there's winter -
comes as a variable that shifts
in any part, or vanishes.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I can
compare what I like to the salts,
to the pot, if there's a pot,
to the winter if there's a winter.

The salts I can compare
to anything there is.
Anything.


Roy Fisher, 'The Only Image', in The Thing About Joe Sullivan: Poems 1971-1977 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1978), p. 25.