Embedded Files
Mind!
In the years before Thatcher I was born
and became a child, while Prynne poet
hard and Marvin Gaye too, while
Callaghan, while ‘In the City’ up to
‘Eton Rifles’, while Harold Wilson,
“the cabinet of Mr. Heath” from his
relatively modest yachts by some
scales that circulate today, while most of
The Carpenters’ songs, including ‘Close to You’.
Most of the dead were necessary,
rich mulch fragrant layer of humus set
on hardening sedimented language such
that “the end is a carpet on which we walk”,
turning us away from our bright fascination
with things just birthed.
Some layers of the dead will silicate
as though they are forever but
when you walk on them you feel the vowel shift-
work of inflection, the patches of idiom, the
enormous trade of glaciation, tin
from Cornwall flown to Ur. This was
before our loan words had to smuggle
in small boats, these were the years
before 5hatcher, before some of the dead
were forlorn hope, when I was born
and became a child, while Prynne poet
stately and Stevie Wonder, while Chaka Khan,
before she sang once for the IDF.
This is the most austere pastoral standoff,
between the firmed ground and the speculative air.
No muddy irrigation ditches in the syntax for a rat,
say, to flash along the edge of our eye
nor matter spare enough to plump a soft nest
for a pet. This is not a land of reassurance.
And in the air sure not the cataclysm
that they promised nor just weather
but alarming fluctuating gusts.
The birds abstract. An orange tie
flies free, deft to signal each
and every dizzying swoop of value.
Our shirts are lifted and twisted
by the wind sheer over our heads
while they pull theirs against the bite of air
up over their faces, while the wood we worked is
sunk to warm oil, and numbers
spill it through the clouds. While our bellies
are soft against the need of those to come,
there is a vision
of a tall bird like a Stork, wings stretched
to dry in the sodden air,
head nuzzled in its
breast then open to mad
clicking song, the beak that struck
the Bayesian. It is not my vision. I
am not in the poem yet, nor one of the
necessary dead and “it was not
in this word order, cannot be afraid”.
Still you wonder what you’ll shout
when the poets’ car veers from the road
to hit the hard hedge or soar into
the high leveraged future or
sink below the yellow woven waves.
And you have to choose a word for loving up
or loving down, for no account can level
with all this
Geoff Gilbert was supervised by Jeremy Prynne for his PhD thesis from 1990 through to about 1995. About one of his PhD chapters, Prynne wrote ‘you are shooting yourself in the foot repeatedly, and missing’. He is Professor of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris, and author of Before Modernism Was (Palgrave, 2003), and, with Alex Houen, of See You Through: A Novel (Broken Sleep Press, 2025).
Copyright © 2026 by Geoff Gilbert, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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