Stephen Watts: THE VERB “TO BE”

i.m. Arshile Gorky

Sun, you dervish in the dancing tree

that glints and points and slowly spins

its fulcrum centred on the will to see.

You are lucid like the panels of light

and flow inside this archaic hall that

language is : you break and scatter and

in the rift, you create yourself anew.

You are the sudden sea-song of starlings

that bursts a tree at the shoreline edge.

You are blue spruce on the rim of frost.

You are a field of gauntly pecking swans

and the first November snow that tricks

the hill – cud of flower and cow’s bell.

You are green, green on the inward lips

of hot night and you are the colour opal

in the human eye of the word. You are

the lucid void between blue mountains

and the eye that sees. You are the falcon

that plunges down coiling gusts of need.

You are my language, you are my speech

and you are a million years old and you

are silent, sun you circling spun dancer

in the still centre of the body’s tree : sun,

you definition in the flesh of the child,

of the verb to be.

©Stephen Watts

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