The refrigerator’s humming outside

and I like that.

Outside of any use I could make of it.

But I can’t see it now,

cause I’m in a different suburb, but this reminds me

of how I used to like

the ‘Here’s Too-ee’ sign, lit up at night, in steam,

in the headlights. The freezing lines,

weather-forecast needs, indeterminate

flow of large blurred lights becoming objects again.

Trying to fragment the sense

but it doesn’t work, because of

the connections, between words and

each other. You try to attend,

but not attend properly, or try

not to attend – but you do. If this is manic

it’s fairly restrained. It’s probably relaxed

really: a hammock swinging in the

backyard of a sense of

quiet retrieval, of the linguistic connections

that constitute the idea,

or of something automatic

behind it.

You think it: Time, small

parcels of thought in train that

move darkly past unopened, familiar beneath

their disguises, the disguises that saying ‘No’ lends

           each of them – and are

incognito, as in Who wants to know?

Wait, your hand reaches for

a beer, but the fridge is stuck.

And relaxes across your chest, your glass empty.

You go to sleep fully

apprised emotionally, and calm.

Falling out of the air

with both arms,

but in charge somehow and not desperate, as though

your worst fears

had telegraphed the vicissitudes you deal with.

Then outside again and clutching the rail

which is very nicely cool

and makes the hand relax actually.
*
The air-conditioning like distant aircraft

or the way trucks hum at night in sleep.

Most things at night make the mind relax,

(against the grain, again), like lightning

illuminates the real world but discharges

ions that soothe anyway.

Inside, the telly rages greyly

as a channel switches off. You go inside

and change it, and come outside again, the new

image bouncing, reflected, in the glass behind.

And time for this thought:

each image occupies its own

parentheses, without surprise, appearing

one at a time, although it’s a dream

from the details of an ordinary day,

carrier waves to an idea or impulse

that can only be named …

where you know the name of something

best by just not thinking about it

 – by ignoring them, in their immediacy,

their fascination – epiphenomena

to an aspiration – as you reflect upon

an ‘ideal’ of self-quotation,

remembering how you had looked up

to the sun above the top floors of buildings,

where the light hits,

as, below, the silent swimmers

appear, one by one, in the streets,

in the calm erasure of their paths through space,

without reflection and unknown to you,

all the days that beat like waves, black and white,

where a white froth of minutes is ineluctable

                       and inevitable and you too far to care.

Though caring is the least part. Let’s say, you

simply leave it, as someone shouts

up from a lift shaft, and lights appear,

rising from the airport, across the city.

A face looks down. Your face? Your own,

or the image in your mind’s eye that expresses

your attitude? Over and over, like a pop song you hate

but cannot ignore, these words:  these truths

harm you to attend and are final –  you stand ‘outside’

to think them, but you are outside

really, now,

and a few other occasions like these.