From Aspects of Reality by John O'Connor

Speculations on a Birdcage

A geography
                    of tumbleweeds

everywhere you look the same old man

a rusty bike

a mote of dust in God's eye /
          a city
          white & entelechious

its down-pipes announcing the beginnings of spring

     +

     No moment's eternal
     eternity's the absence of time (as large as a peanut

     as golden as autumn lovers

     black as a swan or bread loaves)

     +

A crooked path through the bush
becomes a clearing
a plain

     a rough map surrounded by mountains as high as
     the swamp birds

     +

Each spring creates the LANGUAGE of its own
beginnings

     At the roadside - the old man fixing a puncture

     his dog asleep beside him

OK

Albrecht considers the Great Fire Of London
he knows you can't go there
but buys the ticket anyhow

Twilight is the colour of closed hands
the page (of a book) that flips over
in back light

In the Synagogue Of Larks
                    the heart rises...
that's what A reckons

(he said the ceramic air-vents are particularly lovely)

     +

"If silence is the absence of sound
how come we hear it?"

"That's a good question," replied A
who didn't believe in it anyhow

     +

     (All stratifications reduced to a riccocino
     a sidewalk caff

     they did their post-doctoral work in fifteen minutes
     all you need to know

     to repeat the data of post-colonial histories)

     +

an alphabet of sighs / alphabets of conflict

the simplest 'actions' /
like diplomacy

the Prince Of Time

multiplications of illusions
(a mirror in a mirror

in a mirror)
IN YOUR WORDS

     +

A said it was all skylarks

& mountain passes

Poems ©John O'Connor 2013