The New Measurements
Video from home. Beach stones leading
to the water, the water of no language,
no measurements, with its slack body
no less certain of the outcome.
Tell the birds. Knowing no different
they go about their particulars, italicising
a stoop of branches. It took an hour
for the flower head to meter its way downriver.
Motorways thinned like the blood of a drunk.
A spectral trumpet call from some far-off city
peering over the border, the sky bolt-tight.
Animals run unleashed from it all.
Subtleties, a slightly wider berth.
Another inch to the pond, that extra gill.
Conversation through glass panes – the last
flight from here will take you nowhere.
The outside people get their fill,
mouths dressed in a new, strange vocabulary.
And hinged to their windows, their scopes,
the inside people lean out.
David Linklater is a poet from Balintore, Easter Ross. His work has appeared in Gutter, Glasgow Review of Books, DMQ Review and Ink, Sweat & Tears. He has been the recipient of a Dewar Arts Award and was recently shortlisted for the 2020 Edwin Morgan Award. His pamphlet Black Box was published in 2018 with Speculative Books. He lives and writes in Glasgow. Twitter: @DavidRossLinkla
new boots and pantisocracies 