Walking Out One Morning After Lockdown Has Been Lifted

Darkness everywhere. Night pervades, then dies.
Now kerb sweepers, bread vans and early traffic
rumble by my window-side bed while rain-music
fizzles on slate roofs as dawn pours inside.
An alarm squawks that I must not lie
in my listening to telegraph-pole birds getting high
over elms and rowans, lifting into citrus-burst skies
like memories of songs, but rise
and walk the city with multimillioned windows for eyes.

Versions of the world and time are limned
through screens over-pinging with messages.
Data flutters through whatever dimension it is
data flutters through – the space within
space, as I open my door like a book
and walk past steam-wands stretching hot-foamed milk
in cafés, unshuttering shops, skinnymalink
cats curled under fenceposts, the lampposts’ travelogues
of scent casting spells over all-sniffing dogs.

Nothing feels real if it’s not on the net
yet nothing on the net feels real.
Now I brim with yesteryears, feeling virtual
on this thoroughfare, walking into carbon debt
and exhaust-brume on compact streets dwarfed on each side
by tall grey buildings so the traffic’s like a two-lane-wide
ant-trail up the deep crack of a rhino’s back hide.
And onto grass I go, over the sluice-sounds of drain-flow,
underground culverts, into the city meadows.

“One thing is for sure”, he said. Then he died.
Then another. And another. Such vast
scale, my mind miniature. I dreamt I was asked,
by a smart machine, why it shouldn’t pull the plug
on human things, and all my consciousness
could muster was hot emotional mess.
Now ping-ponged between position and sense,
onto grass I go: as if the best way of honouring
the dead is to make the most of living.

A teen gobs a humongous bruise-yellow yinger
onto a tree-lined path, and onto grass I go
to sync with the time-zone of earth’s slow
verbs, dreaming names, faint signals, green whispers,
winged singers in sycamores, willows, hornbeams,
free park benches where a red-head businesswoman
in an ink-blue suit eats a meal-deal Wiltshire ham
sandwich under clearing heavens while sad shadows
blend with the cherry trees’ ginger-tinged sunglow.

Onto grass I go, and I’ve made it to the meadows.
You’ll know, of course, I write this at my desk
in the night, these words already processed
by machine, as a cyclist in look-at-me lycra torpedoes
past a duffel-coated toddler who’s learning new words,
links with the living and dead, lifting in titchy hands
a dandelion whose wind-drifted seeds land
their trance-like parachutes on bittercress and wild carrot
while a frisbee glides past like a complex experiment

on motion and grace. Through the tree-leaf-reeled
air come soft-pocked tennis sounds, and I can’t grasp
this slide between phantom and real, but want to ask
Hey there, smart machine, how do you feel?
Hey trees, what you laughing at?
Two students in beanie hats with tote bags of books
sip from reusable refilled hot polypropylene cups,
sunlight on their faces, and yes, I’m in this, whatever it is,
this blue lift, this light page, this world-plunge, this.

Alan Gillis is an Irish poet who lives in Scotland. His most recent collection of poems is The Readiness, 2020

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