When the Clocks Go Back

Behind the crick and bang of the house cooling
I hear the spillage of rain, the seltzer splash

out there in the dark. I know the outside wall
is shining like a running mirror in the yellow sluice

of the streetlight, where the gutter blurts water.
Some kind of fabric flags and whips

in the sound of the wind, as if the street were slung
with the slack banners of beaten armies.

*

I topple back to sleep, the old feeling of a pebble
filling my mouth. And wake, seeping at the mouth

from dreams of toffee and the canal water
falling and rising in the deep lock at Dudley.

*

At dawn the carpark shrubbery sways in silence.
Two snails are chugging across the front step.

And on the doorframe, swollen and pointed,
a third: a fluke of wet flesh, or petals spoiled into gel.

He had a dozen ways of waking me, always early,
on October mornings like this. I'd leave late

to join Londoners labouring under umbrellas,
cars on Hearne Hill swishing their skirts of rain.

Judy Brown

The Ex-Angel

My ballroom shoulders were ruined
by those wings. Now there's hardly a scar,
just a sheen on the skin as if the light
falling right there had passed
through frosted glass. As it has.

I imagined them taking their leave
of my back: the exit hole fist-sized;
paramedics; a tussle of sinew and rag.
But it wasn't like that. When I turned
my face from flying, they shrivelled

like spiderplants freeing their young.
Feathers husked into onion-skin,
flaked, choking the shower.
You'll miss the sky, more than one
person said. They were wrong.

These days the strength of my body
is held in my legs and I like it that way.
I hung long enough like a doll
from the beating white engines of God.
(That kind of talk does no good.)

You never forget the standing start,
the torque of the upward stroke,
the rowing into the sun. Yet I'd rather
sweat here, down on the dance floor,
tasting the street - if it weren't for the birds.

When I see a swan, like the last clench of snow
at winter's end, my eyes drizzle
melted light, my nose starts to drip.
Whatever I've done, its holy water still.
I dispose of the tissues wit due respect.

Judy Brown

The Ugly

I love you as I love the Hatchetfish,
the Allmouth the Angler,
the Sawbelly and Wolf-eel,
the Stoplight Loosejaw, the FAngtooth;

all our sweet bathypelagic ones,
and especially those too terrible or sly
even for Latin names; who staple
their menfolk to the vagina's hide

like scorched purses, stiff with seed;
whom God built to trawl
endless cathedrals of darkness
their bland eyes gaping like sores;

who could choke down hunger itself,
had it pith and gristle enough;
who carry on their foreheads
the trembling light of the world.

John Glenday

The Catch

The tick you hear
is the heart-valve's catch,
holding back the wrong
traffic of blood;

this click is the notch in a run
of iron, and love is a ratchet
that slides only one way,
and cannot return

Robin Robertson

Anemone

In the meadow the anemone
is creaking open to the dawn.
By noon, the sky’s polyphony
will flood her white lap till she drowns.

The tiny muscle in her star
is tensed to open to the All,
yet the daylight’s blast so deafens her
she barely heeds the sunset’s call

or finds the willpower to refurl
her petal-edges – her, the power
and will of how many other worlds.

In our violence, we outlive her.
But which new life will see us flower
and face the skies, as true receivers?

Rilke
(version by Don Paterson)

Through the Square Window

In my dream the dead have arrived
to wash the windows of my house.
There are no blinds to shut them out with.
 
The clouds above the Lough are stacked
like the clouds are stacked above Delft.
They have the glutted look of clouds over water.
 
The heads of the dead are huge. I wonder
if it's my son they're after, his
effortless breath, his ribbon of years-
 
but he sleeps on unregarded in his cot,
inured, it would seem, quite naturally
to the sluicing and battering and parting back of glass
 
that delivers this shining exterior?
One blue boy holds a rag in his teeth
between panes like a conjuror.
 
And then, as suddenly as they came, they go.
And there is a horizon
from which only the clouds stare in,
 
the massed canopies of Hazelbank,
the severed tip of the Strangford Peninsula,
and a density in the room I find it difficult to breathe in
 
until I wake, flat on my back with a cork
in my mouth, stopper-bottled, in fact,
like a herbalist's cure for dropsy.

Sinaed Morrissey

Ryojin Hisho

May the man who gained my trust but did not come
Turn to a devil, sprouting triple horns.
Then he would find himself shunned by mankind.

May he become a bird of the water-paddy
With frost and snow and hailstones raining down.
Then he would find his feet frozen fast.

May he become the duckweed on the pond.
Then he would sway and shiver as he walked.

Ono Takamura

Masked by the snowflakes,
The colour of your petals
May well be hidden:
Yet still put forth your scent
That men may know you flower.

Trans: Bownas and Thwaite

Mibu Tadamine

Since that parting
When she seemed as unfeeling
As the moon at morning,
Nothing so cruel
As the light of dawn.

Card 19: The Sun

When you show yourself to the woman
you love, you don’t know your fear

is not fear, itself. You have never been good,
but now your are so good,

who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skin
that bathes the world for you,

or her face, captured like a she-lion
in your own flesh?

This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring
upon ring of wedding, the kind

that doesn’t clink upon contact, the kind
with no contract,

The kind in which the gold in only (only!) light.
Cloud covers and lifts,

and sleep and night and soon enough, love’s
big fire laughs the terrible burn,

but only (only!) because pain absorbs excess
joy and you shouldn’t flaunt

your treasures in front of all day’s eyes.

Brenda Shaughnessy

The Galilean Moons

for Nat Jansz


Low in the south sky shines
the stern white lamp
of planet Jupiter. A man
on the radio said
it’s uncommonly close,
and sequestered in the telescope lens
it’s like a compère, spotlit,
driving its borrowed light
out to all sides equally
while, set in a row in the dark
beyond its blaze,
like seed-pearls,
or coy new talents
awaiting their call onstage
– what must be, surely,
the Galilean moons.
In another room,
my children lie asleep, turning
as Earth turns, growing
into their own lives, leaving me
a short time to watch, eye
to the eye-piece,
how a truth unfolds –
how the moonlets glide
out of their chance alignment,
each again to describe
around its shared host its own
unalterable course. Tell me,
Galileo, is this
what we’re working for?
– the knowledge that in just
one Jovian year
the children will be gone
uncommonly far, their bodies
aglow, grown, talented – become
mere bright voice-motes
calling from the opposite
side of the world...what else would we want
our long-sighted instruments
to assure us of ? I’d like
to watch for hours, see
what you old astronomers
apprehended for the first time,
bowed to the inevitable...
but it’s late already:
the next day’s obligations
pluck at my elbow
like an infant who needs his mother,
next-door’s dog barks,
and cloud arrives, distilled,
it appears, out of nothing

Kathleen Jamie

Stillness

When the words rustle no more,
And the last work’s done,
When the bolt lies deep in the door,
And Fire, our Sun,
Falls on the dark-laned meadows of the floor ;

When from the clock’s last chime to the next chime
Silence beats his drum,
And Space with gaunt grey eyes and her brother Time
Wheeling and whispering come,
She with the mould of form and he with the loom of rhyme :

Then twittering out in the night my thought-birds flee,
I am emptied of all my dreams :
I only hear Earth turning, only see
Ether’s long bankless streams,
and only know I should drown if you laid not your
hand on me.


James Elroy Flecker

The Painter's Mistress

And still you paint, and still I stand
White and erect, the classic pose,
And still, a soft-winged bee, your hand
Moves comrade of a glance that flows
Over my body like love’s tide :
And still the pale noon-shadows glide.

And still I hear each sound that falls,
The wood that starts in the sun’s heat,
The mouse astir among the walls,
While down the summer-smitten street
A cart rolls lonely on : the hush
Tightens : I hear the flickering brush.

So with sweet pain for hour on hour
I to your dark and roving eyes
Abandon more than Love had power
To offer, in Love’s mysteries:
You see me with the deeper sight,
Veiled in faint air and gemmed with light.

So shall the gaze of the soul-deep lover
Guide where the sunray darts and swims
Down from the shoulders : still discover
The rose and iris of these limbs,
Low flames that haunt the curve and fold
And in dark hollow tresses, gold.

James Elroy Flecker

A Ship, an Isle, A Sickle Moon

A ship, and isle, a sickle moon –
With few but with how splendid stars
The mirrors of the sea are strewn
Between their silver bars !

* * *

An isle beside an isle she lay,
The pale ship anchored in the bay,
While in the young moon’s port of gold
A star-ship – as the mirrors told –
Put forth its great and lonely light
To the unreflecting Ocean, Night.
And still, a ship upon her seas,
The isle and the island cypresses
Went sailing on without a gale :
And still there moved the moon so pale,
A crescent ship without a sail !

James Elroy Flecker

Cement Truck

I wanted to get the cement truck into the poem
because I loved the bulk of the big rotating barrel
as it went calmly down the street,
churning to keep the wet cement inside
slushily in motion.

I liked the monster girth of the torso
and the tilted ovoid shape,
the raised rump with a hole like an anus at the back,
the double-thick tires to bear the weight. I liked
the way that people turned to watch it pass-

because what is more like a rhinoceros or elephant
than this thick-skinned grunting beast
goaded by two smallish men in jumpsuits?
Taking its ponderous time to obey,
drizzling a stream of juice between its legs:

I knew that I might have to make the center of the poem wider
when the cement truck had to turn a corner,
scraping the bark of an overhanging tree,
giving a nudge to the power lines –

then having to turn around again, because
the drivers have somehow gotten lost:
one of them running to borrow a garden hose
to wet down the load again,
one of them cursing and shaking out the map.

I liked the idea of my poem having room inside
for something as real as that truck
and having to get there by two o’clock or else
to pour the floor of the high-school gymnasium.

- And I think at this point it would have been a terrible mistake
to turn the truck
into a metaphor or symbol for something else.
It had taken me so long to get the world into my poem,
and so long to get my poem into the world.

Now I didn’t want to go back.
Now I had a four-lane highway to drive down the middle of,
and a pair of heavy rubber boots,
and a black rectangular lever just in front of the stick shift.

I wonder what that one does?


Tony Hoagland

Snowglobe

In an alleyway beside a nightclub
a miniature figure is vomiting:

that’s how you know this is no
ordinary snowglobe. there are stockbrokers visible

in tall office buildings
staring at lit computer screens

for the slippery secret of money. It is late;
the babysitter turns up the volume on her headphones

to Mach 5
while the kids go out on the balcony to play.

Oh life! Are you even sober?
Can you touch your index finger

with the tip of your nose?
While great corporations drag their shades
across the land

like giant cloud formations,
sucking up pesos in one place,

raining down yuan in another.

Chopsticks and cancer and yellow cabs.
The interstate buzzing with metallic bees.

The greasy haze on the city shoulders.
While in the park a flock of poodles
escapes from a dogwalker’s grip
like a pack of balloons.

At the bottom, a thickness that gathers,
like leftover gravy;

at the top, hope, like a pocket of air.
But what would happen if right now

it all turned upside down?

Tony Hoagland

Dun an Oir

It is always quarter-to-six
around these beaches, time
to be heading home. Call back
the children and shake out the rugs.
Give up for lost the items buried
in the sand: miniature rakes
and shells and summer arguments.

Bernard O'Donaghue

Dingle

i.m. Garry MacMahon


They'd promised a fine summer from the start:
the dolphins, they said, had shoaled into the bay
in April, and the warblers came a full week
earlier than usual. So we lay on twin beds
in the Gaeltacht digs, reading novels,
eating oranges and waiting for the rain
to stop so that we'd be able to walk again
above the sea by Ballydavid. But as we stood,
seeking out formulas and metaphors
for how the dashed spray poured back down
into the depths off the faces of the gravestone-granite
rocks, something changed. And the next morning
we read in the local paper that the dolphins
had unexpectedly gone back out to sea.

Bernard O'Donaghue

Nativity

I come by chance. A train slows in the fog
and stands a while

and, when it leaves, there’s one more soul aboard
sung from the quiet, passing from car to car,
like the angel of God;

or, north of here, in some old lumber town,
the church clock stops, the wind dies in the tgrees

and I lie squalling in a slick of blood
and moonlight, seventh son
of some man’s seventh son.

No gifts for me, no angel in the rafters
caught like a bird in the updraft from the stove,

only the words of an old curse scratched on the wall,
and the warmth of my mother
fading, as lights go out

in house after house, from here
to the edge of the world,

her slack mouth, then the darkness in her eyes
the first thing I see
when the midwife returns with the candle.

John Burnside

On the Fairytale Ending

Begin with the fend-for-yourself
of all the loves you learned about
in story books;

fish-scale and fox prin
graven on the hand
forever
and a tiny hook-and-eye

unfastened in the sweetmeat of a heart
you thought would never grieve
or come undone.

May; and already
it’s autumn: broken gold
and crimson in the medieval

beechwoods, where our shadows come and go,
no darker
than the figures in a book

of changes,
till they’re hexed
and singled out

for something chill and slender in this world,
more sleight-of-hand
than sorrow or safekeeping.


John Burnside

Mine

How long is a piece of string?
I give it maybe twenty years. From my beginning
to his end, a cable jerks tight, sings, twists, and frays.
And if you enter, how will you get back?
But that’s where you come in.
I’ll be down there reeling out this line
behind me like a diver’s air hose. Hold this.
I’ll only be gone a moment.
How long is a moment?
A mile of eighteen-inch seam in anthracite
six inches of mainspring in an unwound clock,
the time it takes, the time that’s taken from it.
And I’ve already slammed the lift cage shut.
Are these the sacrificed?
No. They’re only sleeping underground
as searchlights cross in the cloud over London
and tunnels honeycomb below in the dark
of my father’s dreams. And they are the sacrificed.
And if I entered how would I...
Back outside I fight to catch my breath
and squeeza around, but now I’m sure I’m lost.
The tunnels fork, detour and reconnect
and circles within circles corkscrew back
to one faint star, or luminous dial of a watch
down a well, which, as I near, expands
into a thumbprint, maelstrom, weather system.
Swept up in its spiral arms, I’m dragged
down deeper, to the centre, to the freak
whose den now opens out around me –
- an airless room of baby food and wheelchairs
where the nurse arrives through muslin-filtered light
to hoover, plump, switch off Columbo,
and bring to the ancient bull-headed bastard its bed pan.
And when, at last, it lifts its fleshy, palsied,
toothless, half-blind, almost human head,
it’s me.
Whom did you expect? it retches
from its blackened lung, I’m not your father,
son. Mine is a worked-out seam whose walls
get disappeared, caved-in, carved out.
Back out of it now, before you loose your thread.
Go home, unpick the knot you’ve made
leave it skitter in long waves across the tarmac
unspooled like the guts of a crushed cassette,
pay out whatever bloody yarn you must
though it wind through olive grove, ruin,
renamed road at first light where you’re last seen walking,
just, to the rest of your own life, whoever you are,
and no king’s daughter holding the end of your line.


Michael Donaghy