Roy Fisher

I've never heard of this poet-- apparently he is better known in England, although not much. I read a review of his Collected Poems (I found out about it from here) and came across this beautiful prose poem -- I think this is just an excerpt, although it feels complete. It's called Metamorphoses.

She sleeps, in the day, in the silence. Where there is light, but little else: the white covers, the pillow, her head with its ordinary hair, her forearm dark over the sheet.

She sleeps and it is hardly a mark on the stillness; that she should have moved to be there, that she should be moving now across her sleep as the window where the light comes in passes across the day.

Her warmth is in the shadows of the bed, and the bed has few shadows, the sky is smoked with a little cloud, there are fish-trails high in the air. Her sleep rides on the silence, it is an open mouth travelling backward on moving waves.

Mouth open across the water, the knees loosened in sleep; dusks of the body shadowed around the room. In the light from the windows there is the thought of a beat, a flicker, an alternation of aspect from the outside to the inside of the glass. The light is going deep under her.

That line about the open mouth travelling backward -- it's uncanny how strange and accurate it feels, the mysterious way in which the words have their impact. Maybe it's just me.

Anyway, it is a nice thing to discover in the middle of a drab workday. And nice to think that there are still so many beautiful things being made, and that you can run into them just skimming across the Internet.

I was just thinking the same thing a few days ago, after I discovered this great music website that generates songs based on information that you supply - favorite songs and artists. I tend to be rather greedy and acquisitive about such things, so I was initially typing in search after search about every song and artist I liked, and pondering purchases, until I chilled out a little and decided to enjoy what I heard and leave it at that.