A feather is about the smallest clock anyone could invent, and Michael John Pickering builds "Circles" around one. The speaker drops it from a balcony and sets a condition: as long as it stays in the air, the person he addresses will be "saying your prayers / curled like an ear on the pillow." It is half game, half superstition, a bargain struck with gravity. The whole poem lasts only as long as the feather's fall, and its central idea is the wish to make a moment of closeness last, along with the quiet discovery that the moment ends anyway, and not unkindly.
The ear in that first stanza matters more than it seems. The sleeper is compared to one, and a few lines later the speaker says, "I want to listen." Listening is the poem's real subject. "Still the feather" works as a command, an urgent plea for the feather to hang motionless, but it also hints at stillness itself, the hush the speaker is after. His desire is physical and a little playful: he wants "your long legs kicking me longer," where the repeated "-er" sound stretches the line the way he wants to stretch time. Even the cosmos is recruited. "The sun rises in the west" is an impossibility, a world turned round to suit a wish, and it fits a title like "Circles," since the poem keeps looping back through sun, feather, ear and song. That is my reading of the title, since the poem never explains it.
Outside the room, life is louder. The boys on their mopeds are "crowing, bucking their front wheels," and the verbs turn them into roosters and young horses, all swagger and noise. Crowing belongs to dawn, so they quietly echo the topsy-turvy sunrise. They also set off the room's hush. Inside, heat presses in: "The heat goes / wherever the sun goes." The line break and the repeated "goes" make the heat feel like something following the speaker from room to room. The odd phrase "You says it's too hot" is probably a slip, but it turns "you" almost into a name, a person reduced to a voice complaining of the weather. Then comes the instruction "Close the door, now, please," which shuts out the mopeds and leaves only the music.
That music is the poem's richest layer. The CD-player sings in Albanian, though we receive the words in English, and they sound like old love-song lyrics: "O shining girl / as the mountain snow melts," then "You melt my flesh, my love / you leave me only my bones." The melting links the song to the sweltering room. Snow on a mountain is the coolness everyone in the poem is longing for, yet in the lyric it melts under desire, and desire is just another heat. The fragment "like a partridge / in the grass / love you have serpent eyes" is stranger still. A partridge is hidden, hunted prey and a serpent is the hunter, so the loved one seems both. The lines are also staggered across the page, drifting down and sideways, which looks very like a feather falling. The song's words also break into the speaker's own, and the stanzas grow longer as they do, from four lines to five, five, and then a final stretch where the music takes over.
The ending is wonderfully understated. "The feather's touched the ground" – the bargain is over, and the speaker doesn't protest. "The voices eased. You are sleeping." The prayers promised in the first stanza have dissolved into sleep, so the feather's fall and the song's end arrive together. Nothing has been stopped, yet the wish is granted in another form: the listening has led to peace.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre, only free verse that follows the ordinary rhythm of speech, with enjambment letting sentences tumble over line ends like the feather turning in air. What makes "Circles" worth reading is how much it holds in so small a space: a balcony, a hot room, an ancient lament and a plastic CD player. A tiny gesture, a feather let go, holds the oldest human wish, which is to make a good moment last, and a gentle acceptance of why it can't.