in the presence of glorious things

Bought this 2021 volume, by Rob Cowen, when we were in Keswick the other day - it's an utterly stunning collection ...

... here's the title-poem from within:


The Heeding
 
When they came to us in the yarden
the sky was afire. Billowing, pink pollen-air;
a final call from hearts of flowers.
Not quite evening, but getting there.
A tortoiseshell lurched over the creeper,
tumbling in. A ripped corner of coloured paper,
amber one side; black the other.
Then two more. Then a small white
materialised over us like a flake of paint
falling from the wall, catching light.
I counted three bumblebees, but knew others to be
lumbering among the loosestrife and meadowsweet’s
greenery. I didn’t move, neither head not eye,
as a peacock butterfly flitted through the space
and yet more flew in (day moths, hoverflies) in case
their seeing us seeing them would break the spell.
We’d been rooted all day. Nowhere to go.
Ideas exhausted. School books spread-eagled.
Pencils scattered. My good intentions had faded
and we’d resorted to planting sticks,
flagging the soil where the ants paraded,
finding the gaps, the cracks. Practising tricks
of focusing, listening, noticing what’s really there.
 
And although I’d believed I’d failed,
that we’d achieved nothing much of worth,
this heeding had been transforming us, dissolving us.
We’d become invisible, indivisible, from earth,
leaf, stone and stamen, petal, wood and wing
in the sensory machinery of these creatures' workings.
Reduced to atoms. Indistinct. Existing in the margins.
Alive to being blessed
by the presence of glorious things.
More came. A handspan from my face a marmalade
hoverfly hung on a continuous hum. And you, only five,
normally so restless, somehow seemed not to stir
the air, not to blink away the tear in the eye that blurs
the world, for a moment, into something strange and magic.
You sat transfixed, like me, by its drone. A one-note
incantation
vibrating on a deep-time frequency; a bell struck hard
and ringing, shaking loose all fixity. An act of concentrating
that ushered in a new realm of foreshortenings and
openings.
where the pollen dust and blurry dots of insect wings
glittering
silver around us were at once as minuscule as particles
and as colossal as new stars birthing. Time was nothing.
 
I blinked first. The scale was dizzying. I’d felt myself
falling
into interstices from where there is no returning. The
hoverfly
was lifting, shifting sideways and then everything was up
and leaving. And we returned to ourselves, awoken;
arisen.

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Rob Cowen (1976 - )

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