SurVision Magazine

The Snails


The snails prove in their individual kettles.
They think you into being.
You wake for the first time but are convinced it is a numerous morning.
The newly minted world looks the way you imagined it always was.

The garden is a square of perfect grass.
You dig it up into a square of perfect earth.
You set a perfect aspirational garden.
You sleep your first night but are convinced there were others.

You wake for the second time but think it is a numerous morning.
The glass in all of the windows is studded with snails.
You look in disgust at their oily bodies.
They threaten to become punctuations to the perfection of your hopes.

The snails are a pestilence upon your creation.
You pick them off the windows and collect them in a bucket.
You pull them from the newly-set cabbages you invented.
You created this world and will not let it be marred.

You sleep your second night.
You wake for the third time but are convinced it is a numerous morning.
On the way to somewhere there is silver writing all over the pavement.
It is a gospel you imagine always was.





The Inverted Night


She plucks a lilac star from the sky.
It becomes an anti-star scented of emptiness:

the emptiness of the heavens beyond the heavens.

One by one the stars still left in the darkness
burst into petalled flowers. The sky blooms.

She observes that this is the reality of Physics.
She presents her observations in a paper to the Academy.

The Academy look in dismay at the findings she presents.
If the universe is a poem it will be infinitely unreachable.

A man writes a number onto a whiteboard.
The number is an invention. The Academy agree

that this is the true night. On the whiteboard a universe
begins to convince us it is there.

The Academy applauds the findings on their whiteboard.
Outside, the sky drops its fragrance on one who looks up.






John W. Sexton was born in 1958, and lives in the Republic of Ireland. His fifth poetry collection, The Offspring of the Moon, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2013. His sixth collection, Futures Pass, is also forthcoming from the same publisher. His poem The Green Owl was awarded the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007 for best single poem, and in that same year he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry.