A Poem by William Wootten

Last Level

The life beyond is felt as disappointment.
Headset, sensors on the clinic table
Proclaim the real, yet one is incapable
Of true belief. All things are evanescent.
The mirror and the waterglass, the pleasant
Window flowers with their iterable
Seedheads, although perceived as palpable,
Prove mere impressions, banished by an instant.

Orderlies wheel calm patients by the lake.
The geese disturb the surface of a cloud.
Restraints are loosed so one may have a scratch.
One marvels at creation so endowed
With pattern and design as at a watch
Placed in a dream from which one cannot wake.

William Wootten’s poems have been published in You Have a Visitor (Worple, 2016), the pamphlet Looking at the Horsemen (New Walk, 2021), and in magazines including PN Review, Poetry Review, Rialto, The Spectator, and the TLS. He has also published books and articles of poetry criticism, most recently Reading Walter de la Mare (Faber, 2021).