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You must have whirled towards me
for there I was still waiting
not knowing how sweet this mask
that winter forges the bright footstep
in the sword seeking its language
the father has come to town
towards another who’s been dreaming
in a bed with soiled sheets
by this step the stone
clear in the stream
all this time inside the flame
without knowing
Not So Outright
The soft star is all of a mix and a muddle.
Hopeless you stare into the black until the sound
of a door opening. This may tell you where
you are hiding like an eye placed judiciously
behind a peephole. This one begs to be set free.
Would it in its blackness know how to survive?
It might help to be at one with the soft splash
of the evening. You can let it creep into
your life for just so long. It makes its way
across the sea, though its waves may not be
as sacred as they claim. Others fill their eyes
with the disappearing sound of your knowledge.
The best is yet to come, you say, but this is only
a rather startled version of you.
Replica
Girl almost at this table, too closely to drink
these unexpected clouds, waiting on no-one
that ever was, so we hurried nothing:
pleasures to bill, kept unaccounted
odd always where the I hardly aches.
The mouth of the smiling forty
something, convinced what’s come over
her world, which has earnestly provided us
with its disease. Yes, people that mirror
my face ahead in a sadder story. She was downstairs
in the tiny office building, shifting desks
that might lower her course, and rather wide
as if, she said, the boys would come
to populate them, as if they could serve
as a protection hemmed about,
but for a local who had screamed himself
horribly soft and human and later the cautious
slit imagines her in her bathrobe, a voice
then graven, experimenting with footsteps
whose humid image stayed on the doorknob
completely vulnerable although in the end
a doctor covered her in wet cloth, and nameless
arranged against her, always littered and suspended
as though it were hers which protruded
through his uncapped, unwashed evidences
which only now came up from her and in her
final waiting for a dark hour all the way
to her eyebrows we thought to ride once more.
Ian Seed’s latest publications include Forgetfulness (Shearsman, 2026), The Dice Cup, from the French of Max Jacob (Wakefield Press, US, 2023) and The River Which Sleep Has Told Me, from the Italian of Ivano Fermini (Fortnightly Review Odd Volumes, 2022). www.ianseed.co.uk
Copyright © 2026 by Ian Seed, 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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