Two Poems by Philip Gross

Night Work on the Reactor

The sum of things: a world of industry
in one calculated act, our sprawl
corralled, at last. Condensed, the centuries
of fabrication – this is all of us, all

we will be. What is beyond this
blaze against the dark, raised stakes of girders
flung into the sky, is not our business,
only this, all the light we could muster

in one upflung gesture, all the ladders
to the sky – as on Bath Abbey’s West face
workaday angels, God’s dutiful gophers,
swarm up, clamber down (yes,

head down; gravity means nothing
to them) between earth and heaven.
Here, the last glittering ring,
is it a halo, or crown, or crown

of thorns, is lowered. There’s a hush
in the conclave of cranes, a scarcely-
breathing, as every vector and thrust
made real, made steel, has to ease

to nest in concrete housings, a cathedral,
a whispering gallery of atoms... or collapse
on itself. The sum of things. Tame sun or final
judgement, an apocalypse of scrap.

A Prospect of the Baltic

Skating on thin ice of a blue distance
he comes stride by stride-glide closer,
and yet never,
                   to the granite shore —

pink boulders littered in the frozen sea
as if they too had been bound somewhere...

as they had, shed load from the long leave-
taking of the ice sheet, land still heaving up,
inch by inch, year by year,
                                     relieved of its weight.

Could that be why he'll always almost
arrive, that tireless tick-tock of him, miles out

on the secretive sea?  (Who knows what colour
it is in its heart, beneath the sky-rucked glitter
of its surface — what
                             bitterness spilled

from old sick rivers, what wrecks?) 
He has to climb the gradient of centuries,

bringing heavy news of what he saw beyond,
back there before. It might be urgent, for us. 
But if he makes landfall,
                                   if he tries

to work his numb lips, all we hear
might be wind, the reed-beds’ endless hiss, bird cries.  

Philip Gross’ The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, 2022) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a compulsive collaborator, e.g. with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold In The River (2015), with Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (2018), and Welsh-language poet Cyril Jones on Troeon/Turnings (2021).