Portside

Where to look

By Jane Spiro

This museum is a not-museum

where things of no interest

are collected meticulously together in glass cases

labelled with no information

and forming a story of no coherence –

a tired saint rimmed with flaking gold

once propped up against a door,

portrait of an unknown nobody smiling

for no particular reason, a dusty sedan chair,

a bottle shaped as a clown, a room

of stuffed birds shocked to be there-

but the floor is magnificent.

Yes, I would be here, amazed,

for the floor alone.

My feet are threaded on a spider’s web,

a fretted chessboard of light and dark.

The planet is here.

Look under your feet.

Jane Spiro is a poet, academic and language educator based in the UK, with teaching experience in 4 continents of the world.  She has published collections of stories for language learners, a novel and many resources to bring creative writing into language classrooms. Her poetry has appeared in journals Rialto, Resurgence, North Stone Review, on the Oxford buses and on local radio and TV, as well as in many anthologies such as Children at War, Having your Cake and Eating it, East of Auden and Conlfuence.  Playing for Time is her first full collection, published by Oversteps in 2015.