Thursday, June 15, 2006

Conversation
by Louis MacNeice

Ordinary people are peculiar too:
Watch the vagrant in their eyes
Who sneaks away while they are talking to you
Into some black wood behind the skull,
Following un-, or other, realities,
Fishing for shadows in a pool.

But sometimes the vagrant comes the other way
Out of their eyes and into yours
Having mistaken you perhaps for yesterday
Or for tomorrow night, a wood in which
He may pick up among the pine-needles and burrs
The lost purse, the dropped stich.

Vagrancy however is forbidden; ordinary men
Soon come back to normal, look at you straight
In the eyes as if to say 'It will not happen again',
Put up a barrage of common sense to baulk
Intimacy but by mistake interpolate
Swear-words like roses in their talk.

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