Members' Areaafter Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior 1909 June, and the ceremony begins. The catch on a bedroom frame is first – unlocked, the handle lifted, stiffened hinge eased to a different angle. The hairs on her bare arms stir themselves a little, do not quite rise – there is no thrill here, simply air on unaccustomed skin. […]
Poetry News
Light box
As a child, I would trace what I couldn’t draw against the window glass, the side of my hand cold and too smooth afterwards. I didn’t think to look out. Fatigue reduces the day to a light box. I press myself against it, peel off the outline of a complicated life to colour in later.
The Day Patterns Whilst My Lover Cooks
Today light flew in diagonals through Hungerford Bridge. Now ingredients are found, weighed. Today was about tension, and relief. The relaxed logic of a day off. Now he sighs, dries his hands. Today I walked away from that hospital. Brights, metals. Now a tick tick tick to the crown of flame. Today the river was […]
Under Kew Railway Bridge
I enter the river-birds’ world, its dark and damp graffitied walls, a smell of rot in museum cool while the Thames’ salty breath dries a cormorant’s wings, laps at the bridge’s concrete pillars, brings word inland of the distant sea, the life that goes on and on, years without stopping, day […]
Power Cut
You strike the first match – the room lurches from black to indistinct before colour reasserts itself in ambers and golds. Walls and ceilings shift and dip, all down the street windows flickering, half the valley out by the look of it and your face, as you reach for the corkscrew, is like it was […]
The Glow
Finding the crab apples, my astonishment I’d gauge as being on a par with pilgrims seeing a tear build in the corner of the Spanish Virgin’s powder-blue eye. Or those Egyptian passers-by, agape, saying a year’s worth of prayers in one day to the smiling saint on the roof who gave city air the sheen […]
The poets who watched the sky at night
What were they like – Lu-Yu, Yang-Ti, Kojiju – sitting by their bamboo house under the moon, unable to sleep, reflecting on how that pale flower in the stream cannot be caught in a jar? Did they use lanterns or the brightness of the dark to stir those brushes as pine cones dropped in the […]
Angels of Galway Harbour
Friday 1.59pm How many swans exactly line the harbour in Galway? And what is she doing up there, Our Lady in Effigy, filling an alcove in her perpetual pose of prayer? And another form, practising her tightrope while lunchers on a quayside stroll pretend not to notice because the world is not a circus after […]
Water chits
Gallipoli, 1915 I joined the band to play the flute to chivvy the men to war – but mostly I was lackey to the medic, sent out with the water chits: scraps of paper with the words, please let the bearer have some drinking water, sent out to the lighter to fetch the water shipped […]
Magician
Trees at the end of the garden are golden, amber, lemon among lime but my mother’s pencil flits over paper silvering outlines she can see of a ghostly steeple, a roof and a path, before she turns them into colour. Applied with the flat of a squirrel-tail brush, thin washes in dove, aqua, citrine, but […]
Learning Magic
Look, look, the boy said, as he conjured flowers from the air. The father smiled. Very nice. And look, the boy said, making water disappear inside a newspaper then making it pour into a jug. Very impressive, the father said. Now look, the boy said, levitating and going too high. Be careful, the father said. […]
Paying Attention
Montmartre, Paris Concentrate. Money’s at stake. A man shuffles three counters, one marked on the underside. Shell game. Pull out your wallet. Put up €10. You win. Easy money. Smirk at one or two nearby idlers. Double or nothing? Sure. Why not? Bet your tenner plus his. Now, pay even closer attention. Watch those hands. […]
Zebra on East 55th and 3rd
Unfazed, he grazes on popcorn and nachos from a Keep New York City Clean litter bin, shrouded in a canopy of cloud that leaches through the steel bars of a subway vent. Sneakered commuters steam by, too busy to notice, too drunk on mobile devices. Outside P.J. Clarke’s, a woman’s whistle lassos a yellow cab, […]
Outside
Good, sometimes to go outside and walk round yourself looking in the windows. There are lights blazing in rooms you have never seen; strangers dancing, reading, quarrelling; things going on you can scarcely credit. Only don’t stay out too long. They might change the locks.
First Days
I left you at the nursery, pink-eyed with fisted hands. You blinked at other baby’s wails, lips curled on the cusp of a scream. They lay you in a velour chair, bobbed fleecy shapes across your face. I rode towards a leaden Thames. The office glared from yellow eyes. I forgot to log-on, lost my […]
Portrait
My father carried his mother through Yugoslavia and Greece. Stitched into the lining of his coat and against regulations, she kept him company through the days he hid in back rooms and under stairs; suckled him on nights huddled in churchyards, with only the chatter of his pad and key. He folded her […]
Names
London, 1954 On Fridays just before sunset, mother lit candles for the Sabbath. We thanked the King of the Universe for the fruit of the vine, the gift of bread from the earth, the beauty of the day coming in like a bride. At sunrise we woke to a stillness, washed and reminded ourselves there […]
Unsent Letter Fragment, Document Number 19055437, February 17, 1948, Museum of Immigration
…Franz, I’ve sewn all your old endearments Into each and every stitch, My fingers talking in comfortable rhythm As the needle moves along the seam, in out, in out. We’re murmuring together as we used to do, Safe behind the streaming glass This past month of evenings – How it rains here! Sly northern rain, […]
Otherwise Known
My room feels crowded, stuffy, and I open windows wide. The tallest officer stands close as he stares out at my garden. He asks the names of flowers and trees: Sophora, walnut, sweet chestnut. He points to the flame-coloured flowers pressed against the wall – Fritillaria imperialis, I reply, otherwise known as crown imperials. […]
Hey Presto!
When I was a kid my dad made me animals from plywood, orange-juice cartons and the odd old sock. They seemed to appear by magic like the man who appeared after a certain time of night, muttering and smelling of Laphroaig. All through those years the animals came until, one day, I woke to find […]
Zoo
She is only three, yet she has touched an elephant, something I have never done. She touched the elephant because of me. I sent her to the nursery, signed the consent form for the zoo trip. She knows nothing of this. “The skin”, she says, “is rough” – a new word parroted from someone else, […]
Don’t tell me elephants can’t dance
The elephant that sat, unmentioned, in the far corner of my uncle’s living room, was not grey, or white (as these creatures sometimes are), it did not brood – fogging up the windows with thickly exhaled gloom – rather, it waltzed. On gaily painted toes, it skirted round the usual chat – traffic, rain, mumbled […]
Dust rises, Dust falls
The bleak swing of the matriarch’s trunk shocks them. Daughters approach, surge through mosquitoes, pace a lament between femur and scapula, nuzzle the skull with its family smell, as if to send love into death. Then, enough. They sway like galleons into the dusk, churning up insects snatched by a wake of birds. Bark consoles […]
Parenting Class
Like the six blind men arguing over the appearance of an elephant none of them has seen, we debate the nature of the child. A dozen women, arranged across a polite restraint of carpet, shielded from the subject of discussion by suction-sealed doors and clinker-built blinds. As though any of us could see beyond our […]
Eliphibian
What if the small black dot in the heart of the glop – which even on tadpole terms seems unlikely to prosper left out high and all but dry on the hillside like a troubling child – were to bud in all directions: the bulbous head blossoming two ears lavish as palm-heads, the tail springing […]
Tuesday, April, 1800
Missing C. Poor C. How I worry about his bowels. I sobbed when he left. ‘Nervous blubbing’ W. called it. Baked small loaves, giblet pie, sat on wall and sewed shifts. W. up by sheepfold, then wasted his mind on the magazines. Mary H. rode over. She looked very fat and well. Fed her parkin. […]
Fabliau (or Loony Tunes at the Beijing Opera)
If a man make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, the world will beat a path to his door – Emerson Our neighbourhood cook Lao Wang was a kind of saint – arriving every morning on his bicycle at the moon-gate, with soft felt slippers and brows arched like the Monkey King, bringing the […]
The Farm
Waking up to a sticking-out horse head happily. The closeness of his animal body, the neighing and whole brown beauty of him framed against the barn yard wall. I cannot tell you the colour of his eyes and when I do think shepherd he is but a vague shadow beneath a darkened window standing guard […]
HD 188753 Ab
A new word for a new world, for once avoiding dead gods or anything safely curled cosily in on itself. Perhaps an everyday noun at random, like ‘machine’, ‘shelf’, ‘window’? Even that won’t stop the word worriers. What we need is a clean name that’ll drop on us like new kinds of rain. I leave […]
The Gift
Why? We don’t know you, though we hear the rapid knocking of your voice through the wall, and see you walking silently up the High Road ushering a gaggle of grandchildren before you, Maharani on an elephant swaying through the jungle. Sometimes, you even raise an enigmatic smile, then carry on, your […]
The Painter
Mopping his face, the painter accepts vodka, pickles, speckled sausage. Climbs the stairs to prop his easel in four windowfuls of light, where he sits, paint sluggish on palette, drugged by syrup slip of birdsong, watching nurse maids shoosh prams like black sows up and down the road. This man in smock and scarlet cravat […]
Yet More Foreign Cities
“Nobody wants any more poems about foreign cities…” – quoted by Charles Tomlinson as epigraph to More Foreign Cities … and then there was Kilpisjärvi, mentioned by few poets, and visited by even fewer heads of state, ambassadors to the U.N. and other assorted foreign dignitaries whose dignity is legendary in Kilpisjärvi. Where sometimes the […]
Walk / Don’t Walk
Travel books are always out of date. Even if the time lag wasn’t inherent. the writer’s Rome, Paris, Sydney, wouldn’t be yours, your snapshots would never match the glossy illusions anchoring the book’s version of Abroad Once your Student Guide To Wherever, your Rough Guide or Lonely Planet, is over five years old, or you […]
Foreigner
In the dead hours before dinner she lies inert, waiting to retie her shoes and stumble back into the city in search of food. She has cricked her neck to gaze at Gaudi’s curves followed the guide book, chapter and verse, lit candles for saints, sent cards and whiled away minutes in corner cafés, watching […]
Balcony in Hanoi
Whether it is the slap-slap of sandalled feet of women who bear baskets of dragon fruit, or the creak of bicycles carrying bundles of greens and limes to market, the road outside my window never sleeps. Pale apricot sun diffuses morning mist as motor cycles weave through blaring horns, laden with chickens or pigs, dried […]
Your New York
It’s not a place I know – deterred by imaginings: extravagant right-angles, outsize sticklebrick landscapes, fretworks of fire-escapes departing a maddening iron-clad maze, lives compressed at the bottom of deep, dark siren-tidal streets… I could go on but it is possible I have things out of proportion. So, is it also possible that such gigantic […]
Poems
I dreamt I found some poems lying half-forgotten on a bottom shelf, nearly at the floor of a room where all the walls were shelves. Leaves of paper put together by a child, a girl, I think, who had folded the edges into an improvised spine, so that what I held in my hands was […]
Exorcising the Chemotherapy Wig
She buried it deep below her cotton pants, her nylon bras. Each time the drawer was opened, its wispy hair caressed the gussets, hooks. In the basket on the wardrobe it raised the hackles of its fur; on still nights she would wake imagining she could hear it purr. Through the solid wooden box she […]
King Konged in Margate
Bedtime. Me, aged five, in Mrs Gethings’ B and B. Door shut, grown-ups far away. Curtains open still. That was a mistake. The window furthest from me turns ape-shaped, splattering the bedroom monkey-brown and me all stiff and human in the bed trying to get smaller while the monkey grows and grows and grows and […]
Golden Virginia
As I pull off the lid the slow scrape of tin, the click as it bumps over the raised grooves, and then, the musty sweetness, sweet blend of stale tobacco and shiny nails. The smell of sawdust fills my nostrils, red shavings fall like scoops of ice-cream onto the workroom floor, while in the next […]