A Reading from Geoffrey Hill

IX from The Triumph of Love

On chance occasions –
and others have observed this – you can see the wind,
as it moves, barely a separate thing,
the inner wall, the cell, of an hourglass, humming
vortices, bright particles in dissolution,
a roiling plug of sand picked up
as a small dancing funnel. It is how
the purest apprehension might appear
to take corporeal shape.

I love Hill’s sensitivity to the weight of words, how the mental (and real) tongue and ear lift and drop sounds, how the eyes imagine clusters and densities of letters, and attribute physicality to shifting speech particles. The aural-syntactical quality of this poem appeals to my ear, so I decided to record a vocal interpretation of it:
Click the title of this blog to hear it.