You know the way life’s shallow bowl
is meant to hold a cherry.
And how the ones who cannot taste or smell can see
with inky clarity the thumping of the fervent gooseberry.
And how the hello-deaf can see the devil in a piece of toast,
or embossed on the see-through shower curtains
that hang between ourselves and the coloured sky.
And how even the merely par-blind
can scent a woman’s pregnancy across a floral room
and how that smell is like the suckling smell of a child.
And I’m sure you’ve heard it told that the quite stone-blind
can hear the water-cooler mutterings of trees
whose job it is to hold bucolic scenes before the rest of us
in their scratched fingers.
And the way that they, the lifeless underground are budged
by sightless moles who’ve sniffed
that nostril odour of the legless worms
and how the herds of countless black and flightless birds
were driven on to paper in their hordes.
