There's no escape this evening

Running rest-day ...

... and the pictured 1992 volume is Stephen Romer's second, and this poem is my favourite from within it:


In the Country

There's no escape this evening
from the silence or the light,

no cover; its intensity slants in
and overruns the old glass
which has wept itself
into pockmarks of distortion.

There's no help for the silhouettes
we've become, looking into rooms
where feelings have run so high
so silently and for so long ...

You would turn your back on it
deliberately, at a loss
in front of such a statement,
but early television is flooded out

by its vividness at your back,
its reiteration of beauty,
and behind it stasis and death.