over the precious hill. You said nothing,
content that we should have our ways of loss,
our sifted, falling silences, the plunge
of numbed hands under frigid water.
Teach me now to love, at their frayed edges
the left-behind, their washed and ashen fingers.
Occurrence
Thames Valley Police, no. 43150331197
‘6.35 p.m. on 23rd November, 2015: the victim was struck on the face with a metal rod by men in an unidentified car, on Oriel Square, breaking his glasses. No assailant could be traced.’
Nothing much then, now nearly unseen –
a cut beneath the eye. A bruise, fading
to skin, frown and furrow, fine print. How
soon the body grieves, forgives how easily
it gives. Already these marks are marks
of other things. Sleepless lines that mar
an early frost. Fields turned for planting,
sandstone shorn against the river’s brink.
A fishhook’s incline, the doubling pitch
of flight like a whaler’s reckoning. In
the hollow of a bridge the water leaves
no scar, only trembling. A sound gone
as if from a whipped bowstring, between
where the arrow flies and, at each end,
thread spliced so as to pucker wood: the eyes.
Dead Man’s Savings Won’t Go to Wife
‘Ms Diao, a Chinese national … claimed to love Mr Soon and to meet him for dinner about once a week, but could not say why she loved him, and claimed they would eat fish, when Mr Soon did not.’ – The Straits Times, 8 September 2016
How could I explain? Your first glance
Was that of an old lover.* All guilt,
No charm. As I washed the breakfast things
You struggled with your shirt, belt,
Looked away when I knelt
To lace your shoes. Those mornings
Turned out to be my favourite –
Us two in the park downstairs,
Your arm on mine as joggers passed,
Wings touching as we flew. Months
Wore on. You ate little, spoke less,
But still I knew you’d give a thousand coins
For my smile, the way you’d sit
By the door waiting, or press a little extra
Into my palm as I went to market
For threadfin or garoupa,
Something for myself. For you this
Was enough, an extravagance, nearly,
Of joy. And I? I loved the house
And the crows that nested there,
The missed appointments, separate beds,
How you always left the radio on.
In the end, they said,
You gave no last instructions,
So it wasn’t clear my claim was genuine.
That, I tried not to mind.
I wish you’d told them how much this would mean.
One who knows my voice is hard to find.
* Italics denote loose translations of Chinese idioms for love:
Blue
Years later, I saw in the Ashmolean
precious plates, fine porcelain
of the best handiwork, that stood
down the aisle on the first floor
in their blue cases. Some of them by then
I already knew by heart, having gone
to school in the refurbished building
where we painted, one year, a semblance
of a low Victorian house that sat out of reach
as our bus-route narrowed to a bridge.
Others I had never seen, but were the twins
of a bright, winding city where I spent
hours salvaged from school and home
with my own widening strides marking time,
close likenesses copied onto each gleaming
dish from Calcutta and Penang.
Behind Grandmother’s house there was once
a factory where, in her motley tongue,
she told me they used to blow blue glass
for windowpanes, wine bottles, flasks.
I pressed my hands to the cabinet
full of china, and dreamt that I could touch
the tea services, with their beautiful necks
too thin, too tall for proper use.
KATHERINE HORREX
Yehuda Amichai made the claim that ‘all poetry is political … even if a poet sits in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.’ Regarding politics, I once read a selection of my work, including my poem ‘Brexit’, and one of the poets that followed made a comment on stage about ‘how easy it is to write political poems’. My awareness of how political that comment was allows me to take it with a pinch of salt; the Brexit vote and its outcome was always going to be very interesting to me as someone who was at the time the only British person living in a building of fifty residents, in Manchester. I was a foreigner in my own home and having a great time, so the concerns of Brexiteers in my former hometown of Hull – such as ‘that twenty Polish families had recently moved into the area’ – were disgusting to me, if not particularly surprising, and formed the basis of my portrait of Brexit as a place.
Other things I wrote at this time explore the idea that a poet’s connection to ‘the muse’ can be plural; that it might be harmful if inspiration were attached to one thing only. In ‘Four Muses’ – written in tercets, not just to provoke the fury of readers who would want it written in quatrains, but because tercets can be very good at buoying rapid streams of images – I wanted to acknowledge a set of grim, but interesting, environmental truths. Microclimates. Unhelpful forms of education. The need to address unusual and unlikeable things in society grew alongside my interest in Jon Ronson’s gonzo journalism; his exploration of extremists in Them and the deranged, damaged army operatives he interviewed for The Men who Stare at Goats.
As regards ‘Goat Fell’, an interesting name and beautiful scenery might be inspiration enough for writing a poem but it was not until the death of a friend I made during a trip to the Isle of Arran that I felt a need to do so – perhaps because the hill’s apparent timelessness, when set against the transitory nature of human existence, provided enough conflict to make it especially worth exploring in language.
Goat Fell’s history as the scene of a murder in the late 1800s (the murder of Edwin Rose) meant that it seemed all the more apt as a framework for elegy. The idea that the hill might be haunted in some way meant that the otherworldliness of its name and setting could be explored via psychological and spiritual phenomena, rather than the plainly pastoral. My aim with the piece was to put language in the foreground, to create shifts in register and movements towards dialect that might resonate with shifts in geography, altitude and mental state, in relation to the overcoming of an obstacle, physical or otherwise.
Brexit
The city has been stamped with leaves
and is a mail bag, waiting to be posted somewhere.
Houses, on a hillside, stacked like letters
spilling over so the wind can almost snatch them.
Its streets are grit filled markings on a shoe sole
cambering uneasily at the heel
and worn into themselves like grafted skin.
The tarmac has a greasy sheen.
Only people’s backs, hunched towards shopping,
confirm life happens here, wrapped in cagoules,
people personable as tents zipped shut,
canvas for the rain to write on.
They lean into windows lit like oilseed,
believe they’re holding something by its horns.
Their houses ache like letters that leave something bad unsaid.
But now the whole world knows their thoughts.
Theirs was only the stale and temporary discretion
of booths at a polling station.
Houses on the hillside turn to banne
rs
filling with the wind, which will not take them far.
Afraid is a Town
Where mills made largely of lead
snuff out your phone signal as fast
as an all-seeing foreman,
where midnight footfall
three houses down
sounds like intruders in your home,
where what I thought was the shadowy clatter of hooves,
threatening to lend more furlongs to the dark,
was a paint tin rolling in the street,
where the scene of Lowry’s The Chapel
looks even more ‘down at heel’
now weed-clogged, cracked and chapel-less,
where, on a hill, a church bell
hungers, behind wooden slats, for every hour
to shake off festering bats,
where, although no one’s there, you feel
fists, or knives, waiting to meet you in anger,
throbbing in pockets of air,
where people still say the rain
carries radioactive traces,
landing on your head even as you watch
a hundred paper lanterns descend
delicately round a kink in the cloud
over a monument that honours the dead.
Polycystic
Ultrasound shows them:
moth holes
in the vacuum of the ovum.
Medics refer to ‘strings of pearls’,
some of which teethe,
their tissue is that much an assortment of cells,
casting out hair and bone to become
small sacks of offerings stored
in the tract.
Even without the scan wand
painting this wall before children,
the cysts are clear now,
grounding me like pebbles.
But I can leave the hospital for home
where I don’t keep
plants in urns, their roots all stoppered
with gravel.
I’ll try to induce myself,
conducting the passage of a lunar month
through measures of darkness and light.
I’m waiting for my body to snow.
Grey Natural Light
It breaks through voile curtains
and stains like tannin leaching into a cup;
(The voile bunches like tissue paper
strewn by an elephant.)
Carbon filters into rooms
invisibly, on the back of the world’s breath.
Dioxide. It is not unexpected.
Nor is it hindered; almost every car
trails ashes down the roads’ long
crawl of grau, grau, grau. Not much
today it seems will grow but we may dig
for graphite, paint elephants in the sky azure.
Four Muses
What to say to my muse the power plant
who makes auras for the city’s night hours
with a sputter of wattage and volts?
What to say to my muse the steelworks,
who sends hot blasts down the standpipe
for fig trees to thrive in?
What to say of the pigments
rolled out in testing chambers
by my latest muse the chemical plant?
What to say when the power plant
hums and clicks and shines
like a fairylit woodwind instrument?
What to say when the belting out
of playground pieces gives way
to the making of girders for steelworks?
What to say when McBrides carpets the Roch
and makes soft, six-foot dams
out of flammable detergent?
How to contain them all
and do justice to their invention of
and disregard for protocol,
how to juggle their sweltering egos
when I walk where figs
leave oily splats on the towpath,
street lamps turn pale in daylight
and latex dries in a bucket slung round
a rubber plant’s tapped green trunk?
Goat Fell
Only after living in its shadow for a month
can I say that its attraction has worn off,
that I went there once or twice
seeking a river locals mentioned
not long after I arrived,
nose raw with the churchy strangeness
of water underfoot and the valley
closing over like a hand. My boots
were sucked by moss and a slip in the mud
nearly had me kneeling
as if I were a pilgrim at the island’s altar.
More like it was the butcher’s block
in the craggiest backstory of this particular ayr
and what I’d heard before meant that halfway up,
when the wind ran round a slate grey howff,
it seemed to whisper ‘Rose, Rose.’ The way a boiler
in an old, old house takes on the voice
of someone who’s not there. Now I do not want to go
into that cold mountain dream with feet scrying
for the summit in the screes and murder in the fellside’s bones.
Lapwings in Fallowfield
They sit with the road’s oily
tang in their nares,
their bodies like helmets in grass.
Younger ones look like soil
upon snow and nest
in the adults’ thick feathers.
My sister and I at somebody’s
wedding, when we hid
under somebody’s dress.
Moon Jar and Moon dark
as the moon jar, its two hemispheres of bright clay joined
for the storage of rice, soy sauce and alcohol.
Porcelain is not especially given to the clandestine,
though here it calls something to my mind
of the old Chesire noun for a wife’s nest egg,
hidden from her husband.
Buttermere
When the lake came for us
a dark hue zipped across it
like a tent’s outer shell being shut.
It stung us as it rose
from out of the stillness
drawing the surface over us.
I swam in it that afternoon
which was warm and perfectly current-less
but for the wind, rushing to knock me,
bidding that I pray
to the pebbles,
the shale and broken bottles,
a trip-me-up dirty old rope
mooring the shadows
for god knows how long.
Feet off the grit floor it was fine.
The lake stirred in fits
but was no real threat to movement further out,
the body a bow that way,
rolling through the water’s cool slaps,
delving for the other side.
But, out there alone,
and not a quarter of the way across,
I found I had to turn
for fear I’d meet the pucker
of miles-dark depths
and things touched fearlessly
by water only.
I wanted no part in that journey.
Waking in Twos
A clock knocks time
between four walls
where we lie caught up
in the excellent rejection
of all company but each other’s,
immune to the pendulum
as if it were the call
of animals elsewhere –
cockerels crowing about
unfinished revolution,
so that whoever still sleeps, or slept,
is on infinite alert, half consciously. Not us.
Next door’s farm winds down,
its owner dead by his ow
n gun
for some days now. Not us
and lorries light our room
with the colours of commerce.
Wood Frog
There is nonchalance in the veins
of the roses you gave me.
Their heads hang stiffly
over dried-out stalks.
I forgot to water them, or rather
thought I’d watered them but hadn’t.
Now that I have means nothing,
though the stems puff and the heads
begin to lift, trembling as ice
trembles in the early yards of spring.
Though the buds begin to chafe
with light and grow
the way a wood frog sparks
itself to life after a full winter
cased in tundra, its solid black
nut of a body soft again,
eyes lifting from the thaw
of its torso in answer to the storm