Window

What is the mind that would invent the lock?
What are the pathways of the brain
that must be followed with no ball of string
to arrive at a device
which excludes? Why would you start?

If this slab of the earth
was where you had always been,
there would be no entry point,
no threshold of distrust, only the base
ab origine home and whole.

Cook and Banks cased the place, reported back.
(This mob didn't do disorganised crime.)
'It is a place of curios if it is, at all,
a place.' The Enlightenment understood
locus in its richest meaning.

Meanwhile need, greed and curiosity
(those drivers of all crime)
were building against a coastline
that bound like straps. Something
(by Hegel!) had to give. Someone

had to go. The blue chasm had to
be bridged, the stormy lanes traversed,
the metaphors of danger maelstrom-mixed.
Easier than wriggling through a window
as it turned out, the landing was made.

Tim Thorne