Once more with feeling

by Mary Cresswell

Once More, With Feeling

And if I have a soul my soul is green

And if it sings it doesn’t sing to me

And if it loves it loves externally

Both what it has and what it hasn’t seen

Sophie Hannah’s ‘A soul’

I am pig. I fly by day, unseen

but not unheard of, snuffling in the blanks

above your space. If you really mean

to catch me up, you’d better think again.

If I have a body, it must be pink,

and if I have a soul my soul is green

as mermaids’ hair beneath the silent sea.

Perhaps you think you’ll sink me in a pen

with Farmer John, in wild rusticity

wide-eyed and peering at the rising moon,

listening for that ancient tune again

(and if it sings it doesn’t sing to me).

I dip my wings in disappearing ink

in hopes of slivering just a wee bit more

into the nimbocirrus cloud of poesy.

A crowd a host of golden anaphors

will light me like a flaming link,

and if it loves it loves externally

to what it penned before. Is that, then, it?

My soul moves a thousand ways, like rude

rustics left cavorting on the village green.

No record now of what it ever meant.

This is resigned to reason, construed by

both what it has and what it hasn’t seen.

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