Most of us have lain half-awake and mistaken one noise for another. Michael John Pickering turns that small, slightly embarrassing moment into a nine-line poem about how easily the line between inside and outside gives way.
The situation is told in a single breath. The speaker "thought / you were setting / the alarm", which suggests a shared room and a quiet, domestic routine. Judging by the alarm, the hour is probably bedtime or early morning, though the poem never says so. Then the outside world intrudes: "an ambulance seemed / to magnify / what was, after all, / the crossing signal." The sentence is slightly tangled, and the tangle is the point. The speaker is sorting out three sounds, a clock's alarm, a siren and the steady beeping of a pedestrian crossing. Each one has passed through the others on the way to the listener's ear. Something from the street has come into the room dressed as something belonging to it.
The title explains why the poem stops where it does. It is "A Reminder of" Escher's *Still Life and Street*, so the poem doesn't describe the print. It is reminded of it. Escher's 1937 title already promises two kinds of space, a still life indoors and a street outdoors, and the final lines give the poem's version of that: "Table and street / were on one surface." The sentence is flat and declarative, with no "as if" or "it felt like". After so much "thought" and "seemed", the poem suddenly states the merging as fact. The word "surface" also works on two levels. A woodcut is a flat printed sheet, and the word hints that the depth we assume between room and road was an illusion all along.
The poem is built to produce this blur. It is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre, and most lines are only two to five syllables long. The line breaks work like small hesitations. "I thought" stands alone, so the mistaken belief is flagged before we know what it is. "Seemed" hangs at the end of its line, and "to magnify" gets a line to itself. "Magnify" is a word from optics, yet here it describes sound, so even the vocabulary crosses between senses. "After all" is the voice of someone recovering their composure, correcting the record with a faint sigh.
The syntax supports this. Seven lines make up one sentence that drifts and qualifies itself, much like attention in a half-asleep mind. Then the short final sentence lands with a thud, and the two sentences are the poem's two modes, confusion followed by blunt recognition.
The sound patterns are subtle but worth noticing. "Alarm", "ambulance" and "after all" all open on the same vowel, as if the poem's ear, like the speaker's, can't quite separate them. There is also a scattering of s sounds in "setting", "seemed", "signal", "street" and "surface", a faint hiss that runs under the poem like the hum of a city at night. These may be accidents of ordinary speech, but ordinary speech is what the poem is made from, and that is where its quiet skill lies.
Notice, too, what is left out. We never learn where the table is, whether bedside or kitchen, so it can sit comfortably in the room and in the street at once. We never learn who "you" is, or whether the speaker felt amused, uneasy or simply drowsy. The word "alarm" carries a second meaning, a warning, and an ambulance is exactly what we associate with emergencies, so a faint undertone of unease lies beneath the comedy of the misheard noise. The poem doesn't press this, but it lets the double meaning sit there.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes a visual paradox, one that usually has to be seen, and rebuilds it as an experience of hearing. It never explains Escher, and it never lectures about perception. It trusts a mislaid sound, a few short lines and one calm final statement to make us feel the walls of a room go thin.