diamonds (dedicated to Don Paterson)

(In the lame way the mindless find sparks fires ice love
bright coal silence feeling)

there on the hillside look
are men with nets and pins
marching to an alliance with the landscape

(I ask you: how hard can you squint?
If you dig your thumbs into your eyes
those images you see are called phosphenes
not phosphates (are they connected?)
but I don't know that they are real
not real-real
not like dreams and things are real.)

I feel this one deep inside me, he says
like tornadoes or a sudden urge

later they stack their devices at the bar
giggling a little
at the embossed pewter urinal
in which they bathe their eyes
(now brimming with unwept sparks-fires-ices-loves...)

This is what it means, I suppose? The unabashed stare
into the eye of the page
the focus on 'the drama of the inner'... Is that it?
Is that what it means? In a spotlight like that?

Oh no he isn't... etc.
This chanted enough times could drown China etc.
A butterfly flaps one wing
and 'a page turns
in the world next door'.
(I forget sometimes whether we ever remembered
whether there is a next door.
Oh I'm waffling needlessly -
this is no help at all.)

it feels so big, he says, squirming, feels like certainty
rightness, like nature rushing out glorious

Oh, time, gentlemen, please, hurry...
these diamonds when we tried them
floated like ducks

it flows, he says, from me to you in the channels unimpeded

weatherproof for anything
except gunpowder and alcohol
or a human gazing into the flash
to see the effable glory (one doesn't like to use cuss words needlessly)

oh but the love the fire in its depth
the way that it simply must be right!

All this eye-pressing, it seems to work somehow