Poem 47

Imagining observing myself as a child through the medium of a personal recording angel, a blind blonde camera … 

… I love all the touchstones of primary school, I can smell the rank tadpoles the metal chair legs and juicy powdered paint …

Classroom Angel

The angel hangs from the ceiling of the classroom
as tender as steak
                     white wings
scrub the walls with light
skin as deeply black as a cave
underwater
             he turns on a cord
narrow attenuate organ
connected to the province of high wild
hunger
        capital of the angels

        smell of steel powdered paint
           among shoes and school milk
        the blind blonde camera
                                   sniffs me out

this angel bites the tips off his fingers
       tasting ozone
                      thin yellow jet streams
       brittle air of outer Earth
he sees fat tubules of beans
split and writhe in wet cotton wool
understands all the school experiments
    how the untidy tadpole
is folded packed carefully
into a frog
           the angel sings Edelweiss
with the rest of the class
in my past
           voice iced and thin
           as the rim of a winter puddle
holding strange unsubtle stones
together

        I'm passing through the angel
           through the camera
        a stream of gestures I shout
        and wave my arms driving the cold morning
            of 1965
        up into the blank blue day