Towards a Bucolics of Contactless by Leo Temple

in my grandfather’s latter years he imagined buying a Grecian urn to place his ashes in:

plagiarism Google keeps telling me comes from the Latin plagiāre for kidnapping:

plagiarism for all its life-threatening violence is in the end a certificate of youthfulness

I keep thinking of using my phone to both kidnap and not plagiarise myself setting up an

algorithm

searching whilst I don’t happen and age nonetheless and the massive erroneous data

harvest would double as a shop of things

I am not familiar with and would touch me even if only by its further reach

and I would paddle out among the office rubberplants without the staid abduction of my own search

history there was for example that morning on the beach when the washing machine had

washed up with people’s jeans dry inside and we wondered at the undertow’s strength to surprise

my family had looked for ammonites on the beach for generations and the washing

machine’s shipwreck held empty clothes

waiting to be cleaned in that familiar spiralling motion so despite the absence of fossils it

was to be expected to imagine

/ the Keats poem the youthful clay lovers’ mutual untouchability sexualising history’s

imaginable and unsalvageable shape

/ a fossil’s spiralling along with a washing machine’s and I would try those jeans on and

they would be too big:

in my grandfather’s latter years he imagined buying

a Grecian urn to place his ashes in / place

your ear to the urn’s lip

he would say and hear the sound of the body’s hollowing:

I spend too much time de-mystifying my algorithm: apparently two gorgeous people

were seen

holding that washing machine with symmetry not speaking in star-lit sweat as duty-

bound they made for the threshold of land and water

at the crest of a bootleg economy and a milky tidal ecology I wager the washing machine’s

emplacement:

at the crest of tiny grey waves it has become a cliché to say my phone is listening to me: and it is

like everything is it waits for its name to be called and hears fragments of its name in everything I am

saying

in my grandfather’s latter years he imagined buying

a Grecian urn to place

his ashes in:

place

your ear to the urn’s lip he would say and hear

the sound of the body’s hollowing:

and when his body hollowed we were absent-mindedly scrolling:

and we woke up to an urn

to keep all the hollow in

(this poem first appeared in Poetry Wales in 2020)