This page features new poetry from Antony Dunn, often well before it's published...
Galileo turns on the spot,
adoring globes and moons of fruit,
mapping out the constellations
of his garden in the twilight.He would like to share this moment
with his daughters, noviciae,
the twin blacked-out stars whose quick light
goes on arriving from nowhere.Measuring the mass of the dark
by the gossip of cicadas,
he unlids the eyeglass’s eye
and turns its bold gaze on heaven.He does not bend, nor fit his own
eye to the insatiable lens.
His diabolic art, some say –
or heresy – earned him blindness;staring into the very face
of creation. Galileo
is satisfied to imagine
Fra Lippo Lippi’s brush
flicking
about his optic nerve, dabbing
new perspectives of galaxies
on the mind’s eye, as – some allege –
he did to his eyeglass lens;for he knows God has given him this:
an eye still struck with citrus lights,
all the accidental colours
of the forbidden tree of stars.
The polar bear is psychotic, banging
its head bald behind its left ear, as if
there were voices there, all speaking in tongues;
its umlaut eyes print-black, unreadable
above the aspirate vowel of its mouth
to the English boy who is here alone.The neon displays of Nachtlokalen
soak their coils in the city’s tank of sun
and he envies the creatures, in this heat,
their buckets of apple-flesh and water.
He would buy a drink from the Verkäufer
but can’t – the asking coin-hard in his throat;the taste of cages – the car, hotel rooms,
the bedclothes, the keeper’s stink in the dark –
and one thought wears through the pelt of itself
in the cell of his skull; how he might spell
the sob in the catch of a lion’s cough,
or make sense of the howl of gibbon, wolf.
From manuscript of forthcoming collection, Bugs
