we go. It is us, finally.
Absence is absence, not attack
by nothingness. And we are free
to travel far, to pack, repack,
to take ourselves off anywhere.
We will be here when we come back.
Sonnet
(Like) Standing beneath a waterfall
gone dry, or sleeping through the sun’s eclipse,
turning to answer no-one’s call,
or pins-and-needles near your fingertips.
Uncanny, ghostly, every hopeless thing
we say – we say to try to photograph the flow
of melding, mixing, bleeding, blurring –
to really only say, We do not know.
Truly, a poet’s words can kill,
and also truly, everybody dies;
when time holds absolutely still
you feel the tickle-touch of future eyes –
and I feel growing all within my head
the children of the resurrected dead.
Friday
There is no insight waiting
at the edge of perception
only the failure to hear birdsong
intensely enough, or look at trees
so they stay fucking looked at.
Until we are properly dead
no moment can be inhabited.
Instead, we are always glancing
sideways
at the so-called natural.
And even when we get a solo wood,
and rainfall keeping away all
but Tarkovsky’s ghost,
we find only an inadequate self.
Even the botanist, the leaf-knower,
would see little beyond floating labels –
an anticipation of info-glasses,
net-retinas.
Dwell, you fucker, dwell.
Move into some faux hermitage
and stick your eyes deep in moss
for two decades. Then you might begin
to be less green.
Instead, tourist, you are ignorant,
unsated, levitating. You might as well
be the pilot of a jet, carving
air-valleys out of rock-valleys
from here to your usual canteen.
I imagine me for a moment made of leaves.
I imagine the forest telling itself
it is only a wood,
so as not to terrify me; my left
hand is being digested in the
stomach of a wolf;
my right hand climbs a pine until
it tops knowledge; most
of the rest of me has been
disembowelled by a serial killer,
the one who brought me here in the
guise of a fictional character.
A squirrel and another squirrel roll
my still-seeing eyeballs –
the sky, dirt, the sky, dirt.
Let us decompose – it is the just
thing to do,
returning Pot Noodles and Dr Pepper
to the earth from whence.
A glow-in-the-dark skeleton
See now, the skeleton
that I was built upon –
suspended in the dark
the waters of the dark
Each bone is blue as snow,
like icebergs from below –
suspended in the deep
the waters of the deep
They keep one moment more
the form they held before –
and now they fall apart
they start to fall apart
My skull, like a full moon,
all tumbling and a-swoon
Each femur, like a whale
or whale-boat setting sail
Like gulls, my vertebrae
swoop downward and away
My finger-bones cascade –
a shoal of sprats, afraid
And twizzling go the ribs,
like sail-sewn corpses, dropped from ships.
LUKE ALLAN
About halfway between Sligachan and Elgol on the Isle of Skye, there’s a fork in the path. For a while another runs parallel, across the way, before veering back and reconnecting with your own. ‘A Note on Walking to Elgol’ recreates that walking and looking experience. ‘From Marsco’ does something similar: the reading is a performance for which the words and spaces are choreography. One identifies the bird from the trail of its word as it crosses the page much as the birder identifies the bird, detail by detail, as it crosses the sky.
Matsuo Bashō’s haiku about a frog jumping into a pond has enjoyed many translations over the centuries. Cid Corman’s ‘Old pond / frog leaping / splash’ is exemplary, but I have a special fondness for James Kirkup’s miraculous ‘pond / frog / plop!’ My translation is an attempt to condense the image, or rather the language, even further. It’s a bit of fun.
‘Love Poem’ is a vexed internal monologue, the record of a lover’s vacillation between resistance and submission. It’s a bit of despair. In some ways it’s like the circle-poems that come later, in their search for an equivalent to the painter’s blue mountains or the songwriter’s fade-out, a way of saying and so on forever.
Pennyweight
In lifts are discussed great issues.
The indifference of pumpkins to their own faces.
Carpool etiquette. What a half mother means.
How poor chickens will poor eggs lay.
Expiration dates on water. Emily Dickinson.
Wishful thoughtlessness. The tide tables of
Lincoln. Hilda Doolittle. The crazy hours.
Umbrellas with hot handles. Underwater payments.
Chalk outline of a bomb. Carpool pumpkins.
Underwater chickens. Wishful Dickinson.
What a poor mother faces. The chalk handles!
The half hours. Crazy means. The tides of etiquette.
Hot hot Doolittle. The eggs of Lincoln.
The lifts of thought. The laid tables. The water.
A Note on Walking to Elgol
where
the path parts
follow both paths
one one
with with
your your
feet eyes
the path parts where
both paths
follow
Love Poem
you are not all that / you are
not all that you are / not all
that you are not all / that you
are not all that you / are not
all that you are not / all that
you are not all that / you are
Advice of the Assistant in a Card Shop
on Enquiring Where to Find Cards
without Prewritten Greetings
just on the
other side of
Thinking of you
Poetry
and, to a lesser extent,
the dogs that bathe their legs
in the lemon fields.
Lemon
This is how yellow feels between your thumbs, like a hard raindrop or a soft star. Pulsing, silent, actual. A stone with its moss on the inside, a counter-earth of spat champagne. A decorative statement about the future. If thought is the eroticisation of consciousness then lemons are the eroticisation of sunlight, hardwater babies growing wiser with each nap. Their pips scour the dark like owls.
A Version of Bashō
Language
L=I=N=G=U=I=N=E
Variations on a Circle
Alexandrine
We kiss about Tom then sleep it off. Co-fasting,
bewhited. In the pump kin light turps-bright spoons laugh
on tiny meat hooks. Whose head is whose we cannot
say, whose words are whose we cannot think. Across the
curtains, the leopard-print shadow of falling snow.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And that has made all
the difference.
The Garden of Desire
One-Word Poems for V.
A Word of Rest
forest
A Word of Care
are
A Duet
‹3
A Taut Strand between Night and Morning
stay
A Word of Closure
last
Outlandia
From Marsco
se ae ag le
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
On the bus home: ‘Your ticket is ancient, sir.’
‘And an artist’s impression,’ I add. As I hand it over
what he took for its face is revealed as its edge.
When he understands that its infinite surface precludes inspection,
we both laugh. ‘A gentleman,’ I think. ‘A gentleman,’ he says. ‘And you,’ I say.
We laugh again but harder, clutching our stomachs. I his, he mine.
We let our love be our compass.
PHOEBE POWER
‘Clarsach’ and ‘Sleeping in his Harp-Case’ belong to a sequence with the central motif of the harp. They are dream-like imaginings of strange possibilities, where the boundary between the harp and the body is unclear. In these poems, the aural texture of the poems is vital to rendering a sense of the physical, tangible body. Materiality is also key to poems which express a love of the visual. For example, ‘children’ is an ekphrastic poem which aims to recreate an encounter with a painting by Egon Schiele. ‘Installation for a New Baby’ is similarly based on an experience of looking, but in this case at an assemblage of everyday items not intended as an artwork.
In ‘Es war einmal’ I am interested in the possibilities of a condensed narrative. This poem retells the life-story of my Austrian grandmother, Christl, while ‘Villach’ records a journey in search of her hometown and relatives. Tone, syntax and prose rhythms are the material I am working with here. ‘Name’, ‘Austrian pastorals’ and ‘Epiphany Night’ are more fragmentary, intuitive gatherings of images. As some of the titles suggest, the latter poems in this selection are involved with the landscapes and language of Austria, in particular its rural and religious culture.
Clarsach
They lift the girl-harp in a hammock
of silver wire not to touch the ground or snap
a clavicle. Her feet are blades
not pedals. They change the key in naturals
and sharps. On the lawn, she tingles
her clitoris, and notes sprinkle with the grass-seed in the air.
Name
my grandmother’s name was Chris.
ach ja – Christl.
a chrism, christ with a lemon tongue.
turquoise water inside a glass
wörthersee water
a crystal you take in your pocket or carry
touching your neck
a pair of blue and glass eyes
from a black and white portrait
a ring of yellow hair
Chris
in your army green cap
Christl
a baby lying over a stream
or the picture of a baby
sex and love with the soon-to-be accountant
REFLECTIONS: TO RELY ON IN HIS NEW JOB
sets of suits and clear
surfaces, pairs of socks in black
and black, vehicular ease, swivel
chairs, wrapped
sandwiches and selfies secure
and hairless, you may be sure of it,
card’s slide out,
regular payment, her legs on screens
duplicated
you look good in black and white
WEAPONS: WITH WHICH SHE THREATENS HIM
her tongue, kissing him all over,
hands on his lovely long hands, his own
beautiful hands hurt him, her purple-coloured
self that goes and grows
with this mirrored body
I just find you attractive
get the payment, slide the card in,
black lingerie and – depend on it –
bronzer, no hair, wrapped
sandwich, swivel chair, socks,
suit, surface. She’s gone.
No picture to play;
wiped memory.
children
after Egon Schiele: Stadtende
sheen and clank
snakes to this colour town
this shout! and noise –
those letterboxes squeezed
to points – faces raised
to roofs! crammed
aqua violet orange
– figures getting down
from window frames
swung open –
raised arms and bended –
scarlet and yellow trousers!
children running
verging the dark
world of tree and linelessness
calling from the roofs
leaves – dark green!
Epiphany Night
bells outside my wohnung
tungatungatungatung!
men in tall white hats
make a ring
hats with paper fringes
men in long white robes
then the kings
come by boat
cross the See
from dark mountains.
comes the boat
crossing dark water.
step down drei könige
in fancy robe and blackface paint
then they come with lanterns
pointing orange yellow white
pointing lantern hats then start to
multiply in all directions, starshapes,
lanterns carried everywhere
bobbing like a lake
then all the handbells stop
and ring as one
tungatungatungatungatung!
behind the See
washes at our backs
Sleeping in His Harp-Case
Harry’s bed was locked up but the harp was still there, sphinx-
serena in her case. Harry slipped and shifted the robe from her
slim dark shoulders and she made no sound,
but bare strings shone white in the night
electrics. Head too large, hips narrow, feet a foetus
coiled at one end. That night, Harry slept in his heart-case.
Installation for a New Baby
HANNA LENA
29.02.2016
4285 g
51 cm
To celebrate the Hanna Lena we cut storks
from hardboard, painted white
with black outlines, orange legs and disney eyes.
We tie balloons from oberbank and peg a row
of weeny clothes, jeans and ’gros, nine
still-folded size 1 nappies, marked
each with a letter of her name.
We save soup cans, bean and veg tins
to clatter where they trail the grass,
pin a spray of rubber dummies and a
pillow, sagging rain. The doll of her
sits forward in a car seat, up-raised
polyvinyl queen. Na ja, we marker-pen,
was kann es schöneres geben
als ein kleines neues Leben?
Es war einmal
I.
A farmer was walking by a stream when he saw a basket
had been left there. There was a baby, miraculously,
asleep inside. Glücklich für das Kind, the soft, fine day;
the slow wind didn’t wake her.
II.
They called her Christl, because she came like Christ in
a mean way, out of doors, and was conceived like him,
mysteriously.
III.
The farmer had neighbours who, it was well-known,
could not have children, and this was a great burden.
The farmer’s wife felt that God had laid a gift in her
hands, and she was grateful for what she alone had the
power to give away.
IV.
She was adopted by these neighbours. Then when she
was eight, Christl’s first sister was born. Heidi, with hair
all over her little skull. Then came Irmgard, Günther,
the twins Roswitha and Anne-Marie, and Harry.
V.
At 21 she worked in a canteen in green army uniform,
serving meals to British soldiers after the war. First
Frank hooked her waist and touched the bright yellow