Nicholas Hogg
Glitch
.
God is an alien
coder, working on a platform
dogged with flaws. Now and then
it blips. The UFO caught on camera. The abandoned
ship with food in the galley. How to explain
that day in Lille, sitting in a cafe and drinking
coffee, my girlfriend quizzing me on books.
She asked me who I’d read
to make me want to write. So I talked about
John Burnside. How the fish would hang
in a mountain glen. That his words
showed me how to look. She nodded
and drank, checked her watch. Then we picked up our bags
and went inside. The great
wiring of track
strewn across Europe, plugging in towns and ports, cities
and people – a man with a rucksack,
waiting.
That’s him.
Who?
The poet.
I want the actual maths
here. That a couple in France
can summon up a man from heather and haar. What figure
is the chance that a poet can appear
on praise.
It’s you.
We were just
talking about you.
The writer in a room
confronted.
And now
you’re here.
I forget what he said. Stunned at the couple
who spoke
his name. That a line on page
could emerge
right there. We stood agape
watching as he boarded the car. He looked back once
and smiled, before the train
pulled away.
It’s not possible,
is it?
We were working out the odds
on space
and time. A planet
come together from fire and stone, the creatures
born on a molten core, typing out
words
and passing them around.
The system
glitched.
An error in the code. The poet
in the program
broke out
rogue.
.
.
.
Nicholas Hogg is the author of A Sacrifice, now a Ridley Scott film starring Eric Bana and Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink. In 2021 he won the Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Prize, and in 2023 the Liverpool Poetry Prize. His debut collection, Missing Person, is out now.
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