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Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems. We pair poets with poets and they write a sequence of six new works by responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems here
 

Unpossessed


The river is exact. Like energy,
expended only in pursuit

it cannot be contained.
It has no symptoms.

Witness the futility with which
we comb its elements, how we labour

to recuperate its origins. The river
yearns as we yearn, it learns as we

do not. The river changes that by
which it is changed, ceaselessly

testing the limits of its disclosure,
refining its powers of revulsion.

Its music, rustling like static
instead rehearses its own erasure,

carefully redefining what it is not.
The river is unpossessed. Observe

the jealousy with which it screens its
instincts, indifferent to our secrets.