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THE RORSCHACH TESTS
He hanged himself from a lamp-post
with a length of chain, which made me think
of something else, then something else again.
Paul Muldoon
I

Tonight we’re judged by what we fathom
in the unstoked embers of an open fire.

You see livid redcoats, bloodhounds
primed for quarry, you

see the fierce, mute breath of horses.
All I see is the cindered shape

of hare, streaking through flames
to imagined safety.

Between us, we cannot tell who
is gaining ground.


II

Think of windows, opening out,
a sash dividing heat and wilderness.

I’m squinting through, but when I fix
on the treeline, it seems the hillside

has been marching on us
all our lives: scree shifts by increments

each year, rooks are roosting closer
to the doorstep. For all their strength,

the boulders prop their weight
against our hearthstone.

How can I escape
into the wind and light

when it’s at the weatherboard,
getting in?



III

No-one who has seen a cat leap
swift and noiseless up

onto a garden fencepost
can ever think themselves as supple.

Well, I couldn’t pass a child
in the street without feeling aged

I couldn’t overhear a song
without being silenced

and I couldn’t stand at the intersection,
watch the traffic lights go from bronze

to red without knowing
I was trapped. To think of them

still there at midnight,
changing for nobody, deft as cats.


IV

There is an artist, far from here,
who renders shoes as mussel shells.

If a shoe can so entirely seem
an object from the deep

then how am I to know my face
from its own reflected alabaster?

Some nights I look behind me,
back into the old French doors

and can’t be sure which way
I’m turning; into the room,

or out into the black,
accepting glass.

Editor's Note: This poem was highly commended in the 2008 Writers Inc competition and will appear in their Writers-of-the-Year Anthology 2008, to be published late 2008.