New Poetries VII Read online

  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

  and from the giant

  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<
br />
  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