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| The Poetry of Nicholas Hancock The Poet of Despair Published by The British Hancock Society with the permission of the author. |
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| UNWINDING STRING A ball of string comes in this world on a stationer's shelf between paper clips and adhesive tape. If it's new stock, it's undefiled by dust and always tag-clamped. Tight-wound, it is shrunk in towards its innermost extremity in absolute sphericity. It sits on the palm waiting to open out, unleash itself on earth. Bring it to your nose. Closer. You'd say it was a chandler's smell, a tarry hint of damp sail lockers - no, of gardening twine to peg a line of beans. You take it home and put it hastily in the cupboard upon another shelf. For weeks it is unbroached in dark proximity with nails and pliers till taken out one day to tie a parcel for an aunt. It pauses between fingertips. You snip a length, much longer than you need, enough to strangle your aunt's parcel twice. You shove it back beside the pliers and it waits. From time to time you need it, reach inside the cupboard to trim its length for any number of mild purposes - measure a road's sinew across the map, make a plumb line of a spanner, tie a rose. Incrementally it declines. Unravelled, loose and soiled, it dwindles. Each use curtails its brief span as a ball until it is a sorry thing, disintegrating and awry; its smell has undergone a change, is mere effluvium of sweat and dust, does not recall its early robust air. It wastes faster than a heart permits its dissolution till one final task reveals the string too short. Here let it lie, neither good nor bad: passing away .
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