Читать книгу Armada - Brian Patten - Страница 12

A child sitting on a doorstep looks up from his book.

In the room behind him a woman is writing a letter.

On the waste land across the street from him

a gasometer casts its shadow over a solitary lilac.

Like a little animal grazing over grass

he has been grazing over words,

stopping at the unfamiliar, the wondrous.

Over and over, as if it were a spell, he repeats the word cargo.

Out on an ocean phosphite clings to rusting propellers,

whales rise like islands, rain falls into nothing.

The shadow from the gasometer creeps beyond the lilac,

over the bindweed, the sweet-scented camomiles, the stray thistles.

And now the child has abandoned his book.

He has become the captain of a great ship and its cargo of treasure.

Sailors who’ve lost their sight report to him

on how the stars have vanished.

In the house behind him a woman is packing belongings.

Another book, an encyclopedia of regrets, is banished to its own space.

The shadow from the gasometer creeps on; a slow, irrevocable flood.

It leaves behind the lilac, the bindweed, the sweet-scented camomiles.