Fiona Sampson

You could figure it as a trapdoor, blur of hinge and down into the unconscious of this stranger moving around your garden like a trap— making all the greens unstable as the warble of nausea come bang up to greet you. Bang to rights is how he'd like to have your house. Cuckoo, wool-wearing garden-dweller, new-age Salvationist, holy among your cow-parsley and roses. Meanwhile, the unaccustomed heat. Meanwhile, a sky tunnelling upward— sense of proportion—golden section of elder hedge; then the disgraceful paddock gone wild.

The deer racing across a field of the same clay and tallow color they are—if they are: or are they tricks of the light?— must feel themselves being poured and pouring through life. We’re not built but become: trembling columns of apprehension that ripple and pass those ripples to and fro with the world that shakes around us— it too is something poured and ceaselessly pouring itself. February shakes the fields and trembles in each yellow willow. • The violin’s back is not veneer— the strummed wood shudders together. Undivided by caution each note is its own first thought. My first thought’s a kind of prayer that I might resonate entire— sometimes it’s such a meager portion shaking a little, as if it ought... Every day, the same desire to push myself through the door that leads to some bright place, brighter than the concert platform, where the whole self echoes together— the outer to the inner pleasure. • Everything runs together— the light smells of spring, the unreasonable brightness of this peg, this sheet, this line tethering linen between sky and mud as if the garden marked a pause in that eternal return whose looping trace is the blood hissing through the ventricles. What gives you life’s the thing that kills.

If I'm you, or you me— Interpenetrating God— enlarge our intimacy. You who are animus and blood— who make me dust from this table blown into grass, invisible— Is it you—or I— I pass and cannot see?

All in the stilly night the muntjac roars from its hedge: a barking roar of July, heat, its own broken-open fruition under black viscose, a sky static with plane-roar. The intermission after the greatest air show in the world; fields and lane recovering; tarmac tonguing sky again, languid in the summer half-dark, towards Fairford where ancient glass trembles, facets of dark open to tumble out king, revenge-tragedy, triumphal colors of God.