Accouche, fimbria, planchette, pearmain

Melanie Challenger, Galatea (Salt).

‘In 1901, an experiment was conducted by Raymond Dodge and Thomas Cline to plot the motion of a person’s gaze by attaching the flake of a mirror to the cornea: the ‘corpse of light’ conversing from its multi-faceted graveyard.’

For the word-hoard: accouche, fimbria, planchette, pearmain.

Sermons in stones: ‘gestures hibernating in schist’.

L’imperfection, c’est le cime: ‘the miraculous distance of incompleteness’.

Corneal flickers of misprision. ‘Jeroboam’: not a small rodent, not a bottle of champagne, but an Ephraimite king, his name meaning ‘the people contend’, or ‘he pleads the people’s cause.’

And, finally, pollination:

Perhaps the many seeds of light
Shall germinate and turban down
The body of abandoned intrigues, spiring
The ages like Rapunzel’s hair.

Over-ripeness is all. One or two of the seeds, perhaps, having blown in from Geoffrey Hill’s garden: ‘Aureate, /Annihilating death.’