A Poem by Adrian Dannatt:

SOME LINES


FOR PAUL PAGK

I draw the line

I draw the line

At poems that rhyme

Or reason’s blind

“What does it mean?”

You see what you’ve seen,

It is what it seems,

Variants and themes

Cracks, links, unstitched seams.

That ‘line’ rhymes with ‘rhyme’

Should not itself define

The contours of this thing of mine,

But I can not define

Another’s art by such smudged signs

Of wonder or the times.

I was spun a line,

A lie of the land or hand,

To rise and then decline

To read a palm not a poem

To know where we are going

Each spoke now showing

Unspoken debts still owing,

The fortune-teller’s web a web of knowing.

Reading the lines,

Reading the line

From finer and finer

Down to fine,

Like the sure decline

Of stock-market or Alpine incline

Into sunset’s solid glow

The way the light

Lights us so

With bars of darker

Shadow thrown,

Bars of music

Whose staves are ruled

To horizontal latitude

Through which we move

Note by note, dust by mote,

As if to prove

The arrow of our narrow life-line

Draws on forever, blots and stutters,

Dissolved by the sublime.