Displaced

[rejectomorph]

Not only did I not go shopping today, I slept through the time I would have gone and beyond. Thanks to daylight saving time there was still plenty of light in the sky when I woke, and I've had an hour to get accustomed to the fact that it would be fading so soon, while I was still in a morning mood. It's cool outside but the house feels hot, even though it isn't. It's as though my circulatory system had suddenly recovered its youthful vigor, and my hands and feet are not cold with age.

This adds to the sense of displacement I feel from the three hour nap. Did I visit some earlier time as I slept, and then forgot the experience as I usually forget dreams, but brought back some residue of it in the form of warmed blood? Maybe I am flushed from running through time as I slept, running to say ahead of that dusk I now see consuming the landscape. I'm sad that I can't go back there, even though I don't know where there was, or even if it was ever real.




Sunday Verse

Mrs Noah : Taken after the flood

by Jo Shapcott


I can't sit still these days. The ocean
is only memory, and my memory as fluttery
as a lost dove. Now the real sea beats
inside me, here, where I'd press fur and feathers
if I could. I'm middle-aged and plump.
Back on dry land I shouldn't think these things:
big paws which idly turn to bat the air,
my face by his ribs and the purr which ripples
through the boards of the afterdeck,
the roar - even at a distance - ringing in my bones,
the rough tongue, the claws, the little bites,
the crude taste of his mane. If you touched my lips
with salt water I would tell you such words,
words to crack the sky and launch the ark again.