The wedding present

631 Medicine Bottles

Two thousand and twenty five bottles

Tip the beach, comb the stars, make a thing of it
and when the tide goes out in space, have it stay there
oddly futured, out of the midden of memory
into a well-washed frame…my bit of telly

Un-filed from the mountains of oblivia
relocated in ‘Forgotten Quests’
given new meaning, a nail of its own
Tricks of Time, Box 4, Incidental 46…

Un-named moments of television history
Sergeant Bilko, Judy Garland, Silly Old Moo…somewhere
over the rainbow, making things was not enough
I’d had to weigh the finding of them too

And for this Time had to travel lightly, carry no  
warning about herself, not know the war as over
With all these finds from my forgotten quest
to improve the quality of drift, I’d made an ocean

 An ocean for the ocean that has no memory
…into my old concrete-mixer shovelled rocks and bottles
broken tv- sets, to move in circles with the water
to imagine pebbles such as this

It took a seven-year-old’s imagination to find them
hanging in my workshop, swung from fishing lines
to pause, to de-construct, then re-construct them
in an instant he’d worked out how the trick was done:

“…matthew must have smashed the telly at
     just the right moment.”

 

 

 

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