Credit rating & True blank
by Peter Robinson
[ poetry - april 09 ]
Credit rating
Twilight, with a greenish glow,
near journey's end, you tell me
those pale shapes in darkness,
they're a cemetery. but no,
through the hazy screen I see
or, better, I hazard a guess
that rather than a cemetery
it's an estate agent's window.
True blank
'The understanding of life
cannot get ahead of life itself.'
Bernard Williams
1
The world outside had lost its story.
A wintry greyness covered all.
As if the drear were a lack of fiction,
some were staring into screens
for menus, for alternative
likely stories they could live
the blank hours and no-places by.
Painfully early, it was Easter -
an Easter with no resurrection
of greenery or sky.
2
The world outside had lost its story.
Hanging over shrubberies
or what had flashed off diamond brickwork,
plastic bag ghosts caught on trees
flapped inside quotation marks;
but words between us, like a self-styled
understanding, a projection,
found you able to re-found
the look of things on a lack of fiction
and be reconciled.
