Obeying greed will make you profit’s fool.
The world moves us. There’s no denying this.
Perhaps as little of it as has pooled
overnight in a dip you glimpse from the morning bus,
silver and somehow Romanly old,
like a floor coming up through the field, then gone.
A secret stillness not so hard to hold
against the rush-hour bus’s shuddering on.
You’re late for work, obedient but late,
greedy but satisfied by winter sticks
and unsquelched mud, your looking’s appetite
an appetite for things that looking at
will neither kill nor alchemise to waste.
We’re sold the new but love the given most.
Jacob Polley’s fifth book of poems, Material Properties, is out now and his last, Jackself, won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize.
new boots and pantisocracies 