Michael Symmons Roberts - Non-Music, Poetry (Literature)

To John Donne

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Duration: 2:37

Unlike an area of land, when you patent a gene, you are enclosing a part of me, the shared landscape. Sir John Sulston Now, as your mistress strips for bed, her body is already mapped, its ancient names a cracked code. That new found land is paced out, sized up, written down as hope or prophecy, probability or doubt. Her charts are held on laptops, mastered by medics, laid bare. Her peaks and gorges, fell slopes, oceans, woodlands, stars, this atlas of hers is no mystic book, it is a textbook of disease. The sun turns dust to smoke, and picks out, as it sets, a path your hands might take – your roving hands – she lets them roam, though she's no landowner. By law, her breast's curve has a patent, so you know that bankers – tired of gold – have bought a piece of her and you. You call her your America – too right. Her wilderness, those prairies have been carved up into real estate, ranches ringed with barbed wire, lights and guns. KEEP OUT OUR DOGS EAT TRESPASSERS. Do you care? Does she? What can it matter at this fleet May dusk, as you seek each other out, and her body's secret name is much like yours, and yours is so close to the crab apple and silver birch which interweave with collar doves and greenfinches, akin to grass which drapes in blossom as the light dies. Let your hands, and hers, lead us in love's mass trespass, let your lips, the co-ordinates of bodies: TTA, GAG, TGT, CCC, TGT (this is, yes, a litany) CTG, GAG, TTG . . .

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To John Donne

To John Donne

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