Fronds and Tenrils
Helen Vendler
- Soft Sift by Mark Ford
Faber, 42 pp, £7.99, May 2001, ISBN 0 571 20781 2
Suppose, having been betrayed – ‘hooked/then thrown back’ – you decide to let your instant reflex, a desire for revenge, cool off overnight; then suppose you wake up the next morning and your anger takes on a no less pervasive, if different, configuration. Is this how you might be feeling?
even after dawn
has tightened still further the angle between
reflex and use, a sort of sunken
tide pushes open my ducts, washes through
or else over uncertain
crumbling defences, dissolves into itself whateverfloats, like quicklime, filters the air through fluids thicker,
heavier
than water.
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