The Knack

Boris was sitting in a field of bullocks
above the house where he lived as a boy, trying to be a writer.
There were many wild flowers waiting patiently to be described.
But every time his pen made contact with the paper
his hand skidded and jumped.
Boris had to wonder about the spasms; were they the onset of epilepsy
or some terrible motor-function illness. Or variant CJD perhaps —
he'd certainly eaten a lot of dubious meat dishes in his younger years,
including a cow’s brain and also a cow’s heart,
though not at the same meal. However,
this sudden loss of muscle control wasn’t in any way unpleasant,
in fact it felt a little bit trippy, and after a time he gave up fighting it
and let the pen wander at will. The shapes it made,
although arbitrary, had a kind of certainty;
there was a sort of truth to the peaks and troughs,
something you couldn't argue with, like a cross-section of the Alps
or a graph of Romany populations over the centuries.
Eventually Boris found himself quite detached from his notepad,
gazing down at the small end-terrace,
at the frosted window of the bathroom
where his handsome father had handed him his first disposable razor.
“The knack,” said his father, “is to …”
But his advice on shaving was drowned out
by the siren which blared from the roof of the village fire-station,
and the old man bolted from the house,
racing along the road on his bicycle, jumping from bike to fire-engine
like a bare-back rider switching horses at the circus, heading
for the mushroom of black smoke mushrooming over a distant town,
and there he entered the Inferno.
Boris put his hand to his throat.
The flowers were still waiting. Then James Tate,
a poet much admired in America, went by in an autogyro,
giving Boris the thumbs up. North America, I should say,
though for all I know he might be the toast of Tierra del Fuego,
and a household name in Bogotá.