Brevities
...a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. –– Vladimir Nabokov
TIME
It’s odder than we used to think
on our heavenly body
wearing its wristwatch of seasons.
OPTICAL CLOCK
Late again, always late
despite your head
running faster than your feet.
LIFT
Going up? Down? What floor
on this floorless shaft through the dark,
this bubble of air?
EVERYTHING
worth saying
has been said, says the rain
saying it again.
A TIME
1999, Crete, that pop song
wafted along an avenue of cicadas
replaying like Once upon
ENTROPY
Heat death of the universe, don’t worry,
I’m already ahead of you,
I’ll turn out the light.
Post Op
And just like that, a small
enigmatic part removed, leaving me,
if anything, at a further remove.
Above the hospital golf course
and expensive south-Dublin roofs
(smothered, it seems, in trees)
I have the luxury
of being eye to eye
with the soft-headed mountains.
On the TV, Gaza
is being flattened: hospitals, schools,
smeared into ashy blurs,
and look, six floors below,
one tiny figure –– a man’s ––
is towing his golf cart
onto the pool-table green,
slightly stooped
as if he bears
the entire weightlessness of the world.
Torremolinos, 1972
Maybe when he saw me
standing outside the record shop
in the white-hot siesta
he thought I was older than 15
(though I probably looked younger).
Maybe when he said ‘I like your hat’
(a camel-skin cowboy hat my mother had bought me
in Tangiers) his appraisal was in another language
he thought I might have known.
Maybe he didn’t see how flattered I was,
to be complimented, casually,
by a man twice my age.
Maybe, when he asked if I’d like to go for a drink,
he didn’t guess I assumed he meant a glass of Coke
in some nearby streetside café.
Maybe he had no idea
how impossible it would have been for me
to run away (like demanding to be let off a plane)
when he turned into a side street, then
unlocked the door to a house.
Maybe when he shot the bolt and drew the blinds
he was oblivious to the shock
that went through me: my certainty
I had sleepwalked into some terrible dream
too unreal to wake from.
Maybe he would have been startled by the images
strobing behind my eyes: nothing sexual,
but torture, dismemberment: panels from my favourite
horror comics, Creepy and Eerie.
Maybe it was this weird naivety
that protected me.
Maybe when I said ‘Please,
can I go now?’, it was a strain
of kindness moved him to smile,
gently part the hair on my forehead
and unbolt the door.
_________
Mark Granier's poems have been published in various outlets, including The New Statesman, The TLS, Magma and the Poetry Review. His sixth collection Everything You Always Wanted to Know, is forthcoming from Salmon in April 2025.
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