Paddy McCallum - finally (excerpt)

It is always there, next to your skin, if you look on it that way

1

a system, a catalogue or register
of all we carry; an expression
accounting for all that is connoted in
all we would say, an off-beat
& wondrous fragment, stepping
between actions with all the force
of a noun, breaking into
waves & furrows, into
dreams, shades & concepts,
an offering, a caution, the last
of the water, our name
for the end of days

2

an emergence & descent
inhering birth yet odourless,
a redaction of original histories
completing a cycle, having caused
to begin, therefore
beginning, a correlation
of various accounts written
to serve so many purposes
so many feelings, a winning back
of all that was lost, an irony
of the body, an arrival

3

a great expanse, a main area,
the mass of it surrounding
quantities of anything: love,
cement, marshes, flesh, the scent
of its vast movement in
a breeze, the subtle differences
as in did you touch it? see it?
infinite of turning, from the surface
inwards, from the front
to the back, abstruse, of
all colours mostly darkness