Image by Deanna HancockAt night, I do not know who I am
when I dream, when I am sleeping.
Awakened, I hold my breath and listen:
a thumbnail scratches the other side of the wall.
At midday, I enter a sunlit room
to observe the lamplight on for no reason.
I should know by now that few octaves can be heard,
that a vision dies from being too long stared at;
that the whole of recorded history even
is but a little gossip in a great silence;
that a magnesium flash cannot illumine,
for one single moment, the invisible.
I do not complain. I start with the visible
and am startled by the visible.
Dannie Abse
Posted over on Applehouse Poetry
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