Constellations

Beyond the house, where the woods
dwindle to a few stray trees, my father
walks on the lake with a hammer.


He’s never seen so many stars,
and wonders why
with all that light in the sky


it doesn’t cast a single shadow.
He takes a few blows at the ice, and drops
a sackful of bricks


and kittens into the hole, listens
a moment to the stillness of deep winter,
the hugeness of the sky, the bubbles of warm


oxygen breaking under his feet,
like the fizz in a lemonade; the creaking
of ice as it settles itself.


His father’s at home, coaxing voices
out of a crystal set, a concert from London.
Ghosts in a stone.


My father doesn’t like that, he prefers
the magic of landscapes, of icicles
growing like fangs from the gutters of houses,


the map of the constellations. He turns on the bank
and looks at the sky. Orion rising over Bradford,
Cassiopeia’s bold W, asking Who, What, When


and Why ? And down in the lake, the sudden
star-burst of four kittens under a lid of ice,
heading to the four corners of nowhere.

Neil Rollinson, A Spillage of Mercury (1996)

Entropy

Your coffee grows cold on the kitchen table
which means the universe is dying.
Your dress on the carpet is just a dress,
it has lost all sense of you now.
I open the window, the sky is dark
and the house is also cooling, the garden,
the summer lawn, all of it finding an equilibrium.
I watch an ice-cube melt in my wine,
the heat of the Chardonnay passing into the ice.
It means the universe is dying: the second law
of thermodynamics. Entropy rising.
Only the fridge struggles to turn things round
but even here there's a hidden loss.
It hums in the corner, the only sound
on a quiet night. Outside, in the vast sky
stars are cooling. I think of the sun
consuming its fuel, the afternoon that is past,
and your dress that only this morning
was warm to my touch.

Neil Rollinson, A Spillage of Mercury (1996)

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