Aspiration

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My solitude is like the grass.
               – Victoria Chang

Gazing up a stain has bled across the panels
from a leaky pipe, its slow articulation
a pool on which to fix as two men

busy themselves among machines.
We talk lightly as if we know the outcome
of things, the floor of knowledge

an oily ghost that leaves me when they shift
gears into medical jargon. Ignorance
is clinical, consciousness a gift

bereft of death. I think of Hopkins’
lonely began, those Dublin years draining
his drained psyche, fretting with typhoid

and doubt, an interloper to himself –
selfwrung, selfstrung – putting Christ first;
his unloved body. In this clean,

sterile room a needle is pointedly raised
and breath becomes a flame under
numbing poise. In the end I feel nothing

but conjugate an absence within reach,
the accord of their proximity held
at a distance as I float inside my frame

developing in a darkroom: sunlight
X-raying leaves; shadows on water;
birds making shapes against the sky.

Consider the grass growing, Kavanagh implores.
There’s a melody to imperception,
the patina of yellow lichen up a trunk

quiet as a cello held overnight.
What this really means is happening,
even as I stand and get ready to leave.

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Winner of The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2025.

Kevin Graham’s poems have appeared widely in print as well as on radio and he has received Literature Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland. A second collection with Gallery Press is forthcoming in September 2025. His first collection, The Lookout Post, was published by Gallery Press in 2023. It was shortlisted for the Pollard Prize and won the Southword Debut Poetry Collection Award.

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