This is a poem that successfully addresses the old poetic favourites of ageing and time in a unique, effective and affecting way. The change of tenor in the final verse offers a lovely payoff, altering our perception of the import of a poem which, up to that point, feels almost playful. The lacuna becomes more sinister, suggestive of a loss of self, rather than of place (perhaps it's the speaker who disappears, not the city?)
While it's enjoyable to explore these possibilities, however, in the final analysis I'd back away from such a reading: it feels too reductive. I prefer the magic of the idea that a whole city can judder in and out of time without its citizens noticing, an idea which the dailyness of the poem - people sitting down to dinner, pigeons "lifting from a square" - makes deliciously plausible. Farley manages to create an "oh yes" sensation in the reader, despite the impossibility of his proposition - quite a feat. Hope you enjoy it, too.
Oh, and don't forget to email me (sarah.crown@theguardian.com) with suggestions for next week: we're running low!
Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second
Shorter than the blink inside a blink
the National Grid will sometimes make, when you'll
turn to a room and say: Was that just me?
People sitting down for dinner don't feel
their chairs taken away/put back again
much faster than that trick with tablecloths.
A train entering the Olive Mount cutting
shudders, but not a single passenger
complains when it pulls in almost on time.
The birds feel it, though, and if you see
starlings in shoal, seagulls abandoning
cathedral ledges, or a mob of pigeons
lifting from a square as at gunfire,
be warned, it may be happening, but then
those sensitive to bat-squeak in the backs
of necks, who claim to hear the distant roar
of comets on the turn - these may well smile
at a world restored, in one piece; though each place
where mineral Liverpool goes wouldn't believe
what hit it: all that sandstone out to sea
or meshed into the quarters of Cologne.
I've felt it a few times when I've gone home,
if anything, more often now I'm old,
and the gaps between get shorter all the time.
PAUL FARLEY