Gnat; not gnat-man. [o]
Man had nailed himself to a cross-roads –
one way was to insects, an other to birds,
and one way was to A.I., and the fourth
way was ... simply forgotten ...
— Eva Dore, from Bite of That or This
listen
it is time
for the gnat-man
to go so
the gnat-man approaches
the great brooch
of the lake wobbling
with light and pinned
to the old cloth of England
the gnat-man wears hairs
his shirt & shorts are curly
roughly woven fibres
it seems
he’s wrapped in stretched
-out bird’s nest
his fuzzy edges hum
slightly like tinnitus
his arm & leg hairs stand
on end like tiny trees
or a forest of hot
acupuncture needles
for the gnat-man is all
detector
swifts’ trill-sounds slice
as their dark sharp shapes swoop
and so the air is woven
motion around
the lake’s fractal glitter
the gnat-man
gently claps
his hands
and a column of gnats vibrates
about him now
the gnat-man holds
a column of wobbling
molecules in his throat
he turns
the sound round rolls
the vortex from his mouth
and releases
his voice with a slow swirl
the many-dimensional
gnat swarm caresses each
sonic co-ordinate and countlessly
slips shapes
through holes in space
so the gnat-man’s edges fade
and his molecules wobble off
of him bit
by infinite bit his
information streams
into the column
of tiny insects out
to vast sectors
elsewhere until only
his voice can be pulled
back through the soul remaining
hole of his own throat folded
repeatedly infinitely
in on
itself with one
swallow
so the gnat
-man’s not
quite
gone
for his teleported voice
re-integrates translated
this very moment
as we speak
see
swooping along the fringes
of a light-scattering
mass of a liquid
a swift-man sifts
through sky for
billions of his own
bits to eat
MARK GOODWIN has published six full-length books and six chapbooks, including the recent Portland: a Triptych, a collaborative work with Tim Allen & Norman Jope. Mark’s latest book, Rock as Gloss, is his first to focus on climbing and mountain navigation. Mark lives on a narrowboat next to bird-rich Watermead Park, just north of Leicester.
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