Poems

Wednesday

Suzannah V. Evans

Van Goyen Fragment

After a note by Jules Laforgue The melancholy of Van Goyen’s pale autumn marines.Sad, eternal wind – life in monotone – boats loaded to tipping point, drowned banks where melancholic cattle, submerged to the knee, nose for grass – windmill struts emaciated against the hills –the little village of thatched cottages on stilts where we sleep outside to the eternal lapping of dirty flotsam and a thread of chimney smoke. Fish stew boils muddily, rascals whine. Wide skies where heavy rainclouds pass eternally overhead – white storks flapping to other countries. But how to grasp the heartbreaking melancholyof Van Goyen’s stained, sad marines?

Thursday

Ian Harrow

An Object of Interest

Life has changed into a matterof keeping an eye on yourself.What stage are we at?Should you be holding onat all costs, to your sincerity?When you close your eyes and catch upwith a sort of accelerated film,moving you in the direction of a bad end,is that what’s heading your wayor something remembered,or the memory of somethingyou only thought?Maybe you’d prefer to be someone else,someone who doesn’t exist,such as Colonel Rolleston,collecting his Irish Times at the pier.Preparing for another trip to the refuse centre, it’s as if you are standing behindyour own shoulder,witnessing the levers of your armswork to fill black plastic bagswith books and clothes.

John Levett

Chin Up

He’d reached the wood scrubbed up and clean,still drinking as a late sun flaredon windows like acetyleneas if the dusk could be repaired,while further in, turned submarine,thick shrubs clung to a footpath wherehe passed out as the pills kicked in,a dead man in cheap summerwareamongst the crows that kept an eyeon all such things that fall behindthe wood’s last bits of tattered skysnapped shut in its ramshackle blind.Dried berries, ivy, roots and stoneswere mixed up with him long beforea fox on heat nosed out his bones,a cold-snap broke his brittle jawswung open now to grin at fliesor, chin up, take a swig of rainbefore the tides of bluebells rise and, sober, he goes down again.

Wednesday

Jamie McKendrick

Twin Peaks

                    the volcano        I’d christened Mont D’Espoir or Mount Despair                    ‘Crusoe in England’, Elizabeth Bishop The twin peaks of Mont D’Espoir and Mount Despairkeep changing places and are hard to tellapart, with their simple binaries of sol y sombra. Relentless weather treats them both the same – clouds gather at their summits and disperse.Sometimes the clouds speak dragonish, and sometimes human. The twin peaks are made of the selfsame stuff – a composite of jet and alabaster,ground down at the same rate by the same blasts.

Candy Neubert

spine

Before I arrive, I begin to walk.Early morning. The steps above Rosairedamp earth held into place by iron pins,white beads of water on the harbour’s crane,a milk churn cooling on the farmyard stone.Where were we? Up over the island’s spine, smell of the pines on a hot dusty track,travelling as she did, turning her backcurled up in bed, away all afternoon, facing the wall, better to concentrate.She swings on a gate opening to a path, empty. Also the heat, also the dust.Before I leave, I follow, as I must.

Thursday

Christopher James

The Funambulist’s Daughter

I was raised in the sky. For playmates I chose magpies and sparrows. On the high-wire I learned the language of clouds, of wind, and the balance of all things being equal. It’s where I found my feet, toed the line, while the butterflies and rain gave uptheir applause. I followed in her footsteps,heard her call my name from the other side. But only when she left, did I glean her gift of light, her lofty plans for me – to dare thin air, refuse the earth and turn down the invitation of gravity. I never shared thetrick that kept me on the wire: with each step I pictured my mother, holding my hand.

Kate White

Pickford’s Wharf, 1992

For once, I’ve written on the reverse where and whenthe photographs were taken, the biro showing through on your lapel and down my cheek. It’s about a yearsince we met, we’re there in black and white, smartly attired after the wedding of friends east along the river, now launchedinto their life together while you show me where your career will begin, same suit, the railway bridge behind you, the strandagainst the shine of water, tide out, your wavy hairline barely in retreat. And I’m pellucid eyed into the distance,the corners of my lips lifting. I might be sighing with sudden wonder at no longer being alone, standing by the railings,watching something float away from me painlessly.

Thursday

John Mole

Keeping in Step

One more dream – and may it prove the last of its kind to haunt me –where with a split-reed squawkI join a marching bandtowards the graveyard. My bent backleans earthwards, and notesno longer rise to a perfect pitch. At least I keep in step. Soonwe shall play The Saints, my restless feetBojangling, the big drum’s beatmy heart’s defiance. Not yet, Mr Bones,not yet. Let all be carnival,death’s dream deferred, and at this point,the jazz gods willing, I shall wake.

Claire Booker

Museum of Childhood

The little dictionary lies open at A for Applewhere it all begins. I want to turn the pages, but the vitrine is a border crossing; my ageing face, stamped on its glass and my papers way out of date. Moths have been at work along the faded pink of a rabbit’s ear. It’s swiveled to catch lost sounds. A big, red button reads: PRESS ME. So I do, and the little train clatters along N-gauge tracks –disappears into the papier-mâché tunnel. A long heart-skip, before it emerges still guarding its secret: the dark curved space, a pin prick of light dilating like an amazed pupilat the approaching world.

Roy Kelly

Proof and Belief

On the hearth of the working fireplace, the flags dusted with ash, we leave mince pies and a bottle of beer that Father Christmas might feed his face and wet his whistle while he is here, refreshment before he has to dash, having deposited the mystery of wrapped packages a further time in his series of deceptive appearances, the continuing collusion, what you see and what you get, and how they rhyme with the evidence of disappearances: the empty bottle a child lifts from the grate; the mince pies missing from a crumb-specked plate.

Thursday

Boris Johnson

To a Turkish president

There was a young fellow from Ankara Who was a terrific wankera Till he sowed his wild oats With the help of a goat But he didn’t even stop to thankera.   *Extempore limerick in conversation with Nicholas Farrell and Urs Gehriger for the Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche.

Thursday

Fred Johnston

Arrest

The sun always grabs us by surprise its yolky wash on a pub wall the clumsy spill round the black legs of café tables. it rains so frequently it’s like the sea trying to climb out of its skin. The beach is a runnelled grey, an old man’s face in cardiac arrest. we have stopped being pretty, all of us too many pills and pill-packs embarrass our pockets; the future served up three times daily after meals.

Thursday

Connie Bensley

Tina

Dearest, I’d love to have your Tina to stay — what are aunts for? — but I’m not sure if it can be managed just now. I know you’d like her to have a change of scene after that business with her maths tutor (has he gone back to his family now, by the way?) And I really admire her for being a vegan and only eating that food beginning with Q which I could never find round here. She was so animated at that party of mine she turned up at, and I’m sorry she lost her nose studs. The broken glass was no problem, just a stitch or two. It’s such fun having a young person around: but, alas, I’m expecting the decorators any day now. Such a shame. But do let’s keep in touch.

Thursday

Paul Collier

Breaking

Was everybody scared? Mum was, certainly. Slip-clinging hold, respectability. World-lost, he didn’t care,   Or didn’t cotton on. Inexplicably, He once broke out, performing memorably: Reckless, and with aplomb.   Mistiming exquisite; Turning their stomachs; Master-class for me in how to flummox Guests: it was The Visit.   Scented and Sunday-clad, – Teacups four-high, stacked, And then paraded like a circus act – Mother pronounced him mad.   Kitchen philosophy, The moment passed. The next time tumbled everything amassed; Her judgment, prophecy.

Thursday

Roy Kelly

Another Slice

All the books stored above our heads, all the books there aren’t enough hours to read again, and still we hesitate to banish them complete. The second-hand life, charity shops, jumble sales, car boot fields: the slow long-term dance, temporary ownership, possession and loss. Charity shops can take anything unwanted, books and LPs, the unfashionable fashions, but all those hours that used to be you, what ever happened to them? Sometimes, as with burnt toast, things can’t be salvaged or scraped right. You have to discard. Start again.

Thursday

Fiona Wilson

Abide with Me

Was our first date really a boxer’s funeral? You in pitch, me in black—all in all a noirish affair, how we felt so at home with those lump-faced men, the mourners wrapped in silk and onyx watches, their Stygian raincoats soaked. And did their tears heave a river, a torrent, down Amsterdam as the organ struck up the Eventide hymn and something deepened, and something deepened, and was it later, or then, I took your hand in my hand, so you could feel my stung fist harden?

Thursday

Roy Kelly

Coffee with Annie

I am thinking about you Annie now that you are no longer a few miles of motorway and a couple of roundabouts from us here. I am remembering the meals, the easy chat and coffee; farewell coats and hugs in a doorway; that holiday we shared in Brixham, the fear of the foot noise on the stair which made us believe in ghosts that week, the sea house creaking, and the air screeching and crying with gulls in the dark or light until the wives couldn’t sleep in the haunted place. (How easy it is to be scared of no-one there.) And now you are not here, and your face can only live in memory’s day and night and everything that was you has been made to leave.

Thursday

Connie Bensley

New Neighbour

The trellis between her garden and her new neighbour’s garden is heavy with passion flower, honeysuckle and roses, so that only rare glimpses can be seen through it — a blue flower, a splash of grass, a dark cuff. She calls out politely to welcome him to the neighbourhood. Weeks later, she calls out to him again and, slowly, emboldened by invisibility, she hears herself offering confidences — her fears, guilts and indecisions. It must be like a confessional, only sunnier and without penances. She thinks she hears him breathing attentively, but then there is the muffled sound of his back door closing.

Thursday

Ian Harrow

En Retrait

Since I decided to accept this quiet corner of the garden as my undeserved Elysium and to make the birdsong and the flowers stand for the rightness of everything, I find I have no need to show how many pieces the world is in, how better and worse it always is; where motivated reason and unreason lead and where the next fall and salvation’s coming from. No remorse, the last hurrah of influence, survives this light, constant and evenly-spread, from lawn and bush, towards the open fields.

Thursday

Fred Johnston

Bone Scanning

Perhaps like Superman I will see through walls now that I’ve tanked up on isotopes lighting bruise-blue veins and sparking neon from suspect bones the camera, smoochy as a lover will map out the secret places where little bumpy evils lurk jigsawing until I am like a find in a dig and there it is, the whole of me in middle-age nothing for a lover to caress a Hallowe’en thing with the ugly quiet of the dead. Give this clatter of razor-white calcium a name even as its anonymity claims its non-identity a figure polished up from a mass grave a chip in the skull where the bullet went in not a movement or the image will blur as if a spirit wrestled its way out of the frame call it a soul, if you will, it won’t matter I am my own atrocity, I know that now.