Copyright Urban Mole 2016
I was on the train recently, staring at the rails and the blur of sleepers between. If I very quickly moved my eyes against the direction of travel, I caught a glimpse of an individual sleeper and its neighbours; I was able to slow the flow of data just enough to pick out a little detail. Among the many boundaries of (human) perception, high speed, in the sense of a given volume of information over time, was hiding the little things. And making me boss-eyed.
Kipling, Rudyard / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
It’s chasmic, the fall of words down lines curved by the half open page to the black gulch below, where shadows form on sunny days or in the half light, oblique; at fifty degrees and cool as the cover is under the fingers on the other side of the world: fifty degrees and cool, the right angle for light and weather.
Copyright: Faber & Faber
A Kill‘s power is in its fifteenth line, in the only spoken text of the poem: “It’s a boy!” It’s a fulcrum and it prises the perception of a brutal, lingering death to show a birth. But it’s no gift.
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