Poetry Focus On: OLIVER DIXON

Oliver Dixon is a poet and writer based in London whose poems and reviews have appeared in PN Review, London Magazine, The Wolf, Frogmore Papers, Long Poem Magazine, Blackbox Manifold and Gists and Piths. His debut volume is forthcoming February 2013 from Penned in the Margins. He blogs at Ictus.

Cartoon Man

One moment sun, same ochre as the leaves

it’s steeped through, gracing my meander home

from work – the next : this odd attempt at rain,

hardly rain at all but just this gentlest

sprinkling imaginable, sparkling down out of a blue

cloudless except for several oval clumps

like ideas occurring to a cartoon man:

am I him then, caught between two weathers,

clowning through this ticker-tape parade

of glimmers set up for someone worthier

to read a Sign in, some epiphanic

confirmation of faith – for him, perhaps,

the old asylum-seeker, fled from war

and displacement as I’ve fled driving-tests

and over-crowded tubes, but too busy today

spiking leaves one by one into his sack

even as others, other rusted hinges,

twirl unscrewed around him? Is there time,

in the end, or space in our memories

to pause and remember anything

so fugitive, uncatchable, each droplet

a tiny aperture onto a timelier moment,

a vivider world which is nonetheless

this one I have only to live in?

poem by Oliver Dixon; published online with permission of the author.

Comments

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