Arthur Seymour John Tessimond Poems

Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind.
They slip, diminished, neat through loopholes
Less than themselves; will not be pinned
...

I am the unnoticed, the unnoticable man:
The man who sat on your right in the morning train:
The man who looked through like a windowpane:
The man who was the colour of the carriage, the colour of the mounting
...

One day people will touch and talk perhaps
easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as
sunlight,
...

The birch tree in winter
Leaning over the secret pool
Is Narcissus in love
With the slight white branches,
...

This is not Love, perhaps,
Love that lays down its life,
that many waters cannot quench,
nor the floods drown,
...

This trumpeter of nothingness, employed
To keep our reason dull and null and void.
This man of wind and froth and flux will sell
The wares of any who reward him well.
...

If a man says half himself in the light, adroit
Way a tune shakes into equilibrium,
Or approximates to a note that never comes:
...

This shape without space,
This pattern without stuff,
This stream without dimension
Surrounds us, flows through us,
...

Light's patterns freeze:
Frost on our faces.
Light's pollen sifts
Through the lids of our eyes ...
...

I, after difficult entry through my mother's blood
And stumbling childhood (hitting my head against the world);
I, intricate, easily unshipped, untracked, unaligned;
Cut off in my communications; stammering; speaking
...