Extract from Ode: Intimations of Wordsworth from a Digital Earth

Isabelle Masters

Back before I was Wordsworth (on the common rustic road)

I could find the unnatural light of

Lens flairs above, the

WARNING – COWS – SIGN

, the landscape Bovine Bare. 

Even when there was nowhere to move in a pool

of what looked like blood I saw the reflection of 

red car lights 

on snow.

But as we drove on the scene grew desaturated 

shadows elongated

workmen signage

Blue-Sky Earth immense

metal campsite sport centre mountain

range climbing

“It’s as if we’re really there!” rings silent to 

The virtual car,

it produces its own humming.

In truth

I act as pegged sheets hang –

As if unalive – 

I used to see painted clouds on the corner of a house,

but now the brickwork shows through at a surface level.

Oh even a discarded sofa gave little me thoughts deeper than samey suburbia

Oh Silenced were the promises of red paint and felled trees:

That greenhouses should repeat infinitely filled with pleasures of Earth.

The broken wall has bricked in the Delonix Regia now.

His whole vocation was to spot that which seems enchanted (encrypted) next to what we have at home, a plastic chair surrounded by wooden chairs

Houses that were blue and yellow, the peacock Flower’s home, are sterile now.

There was a factory, of many, one, and the live wire fence ran (without that familiar humming presence) over where the tiled ground was earthy and warm the Royal Poinciana looks like a holiday resort now. 

Now I am Wordsworth and the facelessness of high visibility jackets.

When the loud eyes of 

Blake’s Lottaburgertm

emerged from the dust of 

possible past meanings it choked on 

the star-spangled flag where

A dog waste bin could be filled with dog waste.

Now, every car is bathed in foreign light from
  C

  R

C O N C U R E T E

  S

  I

  F

  I

              X

              E

S

Built into bodies of text.

The car looks round with fear

For the sign is rusted bare.

Me, Wordsworth, in imitation of a geo-guesser?

Labouring?

I step out of his car, look round,

And see his daughter’s hand

Pressed against tinted glass and I think that was us:

It hints at our noninteractive history.

But now we are at an interchange with a 

timely blank red road sign

as our canvas.

Outside I think we could be

A wetsuit forever drying out on a beach 

Rocks my feet can’t 

Out of body

Experience.

I can hear earth’s hum, as a spontaneous overflow of feeling: yes

I am the Kat III Industrial Van 

packed with animal biproduct fit for

Human Consumption

And I will drive where I please.

To the road which scatters its surface with ornate manhole covers,

To the road lined with thick black oily stripes that resemble glitches,

To the road which leads to a village, off limits to road traversers.

Then we come to a grinding halt beyond a bus stop thoughts 

I can’t look around so use my mirrors to see

The shattered bus stop glass as it speaks to me:

 “Hugo Servin Sinergia Sinergia HS Hugo Servin”

Silent encompassed enrapturing embodiment of camera

“Hugo Servin Social REGIDOR MORELIA Facebook Instagram”

Untranslatable signage of schoolchildren and lorries buried in the earth at a steep incline.

With that I am being apparelled in stickers of council bin rotas with the knowledge that google earth doesn’t soil your fingertips as it slips through your grasp.

I have been traveling for so long,

That the common barn seems submerged in 

likeness to the Parthenon,

Transported by cables 

thick enough to block out interference 

on Pepsi Max Multipack.

Trekking endless roads in seconds to the white house where the Presidential 

statue tends to the flower 

garden and the boat

 is a hammock

and the I is a Wordsworth

and the we are a

home at last! I can recount my memories start rushing back to me. The soil of home. The parachute we would throw up into the air and crawl under being plunged in darkness. I’m sure we were the cat and the mouse. I’m sure that in this our garden we are free to wonder

why the basketball hoop is starting a revolution in the unsettling sameness perfect barrenness of

A vending machine white that screams out of

A vacant car parking space is in Wordsworth’s driveway because you can’t get to the lake district by train.

Maybe they know this place like the back of their hand, but my self does not know where home is anymore.

“It’s the little button with the house symbol”