


			Tim Atkins

			PETRARCH 248 PETRARCH 249 PETRARCH 250 PETRARCH 251

			PETRARCH 248 She of the biggest fins she between knowledge and experience The Petrarchian or English Sonnet with their separate demands Namely the unconditional namely a fully functioning mass public transport system Between two ice ages in which it is possible to live for such a short time among ant leaders Impacting the death of the novel and the internal combustion engine the breasts & all still Mediterranean to awaken on a cool marble floor on a hot morning The watch saying it is 5:15am in the bowling aisles and arcades of the west There is organic food in the belly love and a cure for cold feet has just been invented Why not feel optimistic for a day what follows is always laced with dissatisfaction & wrath To climb on top of a woman wearing a bearsuit record & observe it May well have to be enough before being overcome by too much sight Waiting is wrong Probiotic drinks may prolong life But they can never preserve it ■ PETRARCH 249 On 22^nd April 2003 when La Vita Nuova filled me & I ate its wet pages for the first time like a roach Intentionality writes itself in the mind of the writer Waiting to protect its young from insecticide & the self If you beat on this chest you will surely hear a rattle Like a bean which has cracked with the ice of two women Reclining in the Judgment of Paris beneath a tree in sneakers I wake up I put on a blue shirt I do this & not that Defined by relationship and negative capability all the world Floods in alone in a garage pressing the grey concrete floor with either A face or 2 feet a woman fixed a pipe once to her car then & then did it When the knife grew closest to the heart in Somers Town It was possible to be saved by James Joyce’s epiphanies But in this case Love All he promised was false ■ PETRARCH 250 Herbal remedies like women’s names for sleeplessness Instructions read adopt a literary approach As a cure for attraction to jelly and what can be done with it The trains rattle authorial teeth 250 poems in to my subject which is— The necessity to appear rational when undermined by the weather The ability to live forever in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary The happiness confronted by female stacks The quote which rises & which lists At the end of all thinking there is a life It is a spoon in my eye & when you read it it says this Do not hope to see me here on this Earth The absence of the word “again” suggests what? We never did ■ PETRARCH 251 In a book called to speak while dreaming I am the author on the cover & my name is Eleni & I am tall & filled with both Sturdiness & grace & in my dream In which I am with Robert Lowell in a lake & we embrace why is it always easier to live in front of the big books Than a double bed why does the daughter light Shine without burning although my calendar is mostly Black around the eyes from sleeplessness & her small arm Thrown across mine is written out of the official romantic story To return the earth to its previous harmony I will do as Blaise Pascal Intimates in his stories which is resist this notion Romantic celebrity lunches & cleave to the one love written out of the official story Beneath the lake One Daughter Light where my heart does not break


					pastsimple