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Alex Middleton |
Alex Middleton has been published in a range of magazines and is active on the Manchester poetry scene. She is very interested in linguistics and the frontier areas of language, culture and personal and collective identities. A selection of her translations from Danish can be found in PNR magazine.
My Mother’s Tongue
Language is what we live in: Little houses
where we bring up children & abandon ourselves.
My mother’s tongue is falling down
her throat; she stays indoors for months.
For years this language was ours alone,
my mother’s & mine. Now I am taking it
& I am drawing back curtains with it
& almost feeling at home in this strange country.
About Water
Before me on the table: a glass of sea,
a glass of lake, a glass of shallow puddle.
This is not a riddle nor a game.
It is about water, about arriving at simplicity,
about sea seeping into the floorboards
& washing my face in lake.
As for the glass of puddle, I shall save it for later,
for when grand gestures are no longer appropriate.
For her
Just as the day waits for her, its hours slowing
to let her sleep a little longer, strawberries ripening,
roads bending for her & raindrops avoiding her,
he is standing on a street corner, fading away,
until the click of heels & her sorry I’m late
reanimate his ghostlike face. The curve of his shoulder
perfects itself to meet her touch. He doesn’t know
that she tells her friends about the man she keeps
in a cupboard who thinks she’s a god. They don’t
believe her, but smile and nod, invite her to bring him
to dinner. And just to spite them she doesn’t turn up,
dreaming that night of unoccupied chairs, raw meat.
The Bookseller
He works in rooms without windows. Behind his smile
the shallow electric light treads his teeth in a minor key.
He sells books he wouldn’t have wanted to write, traces the spines
of those he’ll steal – Ashbery, Brathwaite, cummings, Dunn.
His lunchbreaks are measured heavens of grass and crisps.
He creases his shirt. She bulges his trousers and traces
his spine, stealing a moment longer, listening
to words that will not change the world, but try.
All afternoon he reminds himself how many hours
make up a life, stacks shelves, stirs sugar into tea.
The job has taught him his way round the alphabet
but he starts dropping his tees about 5 pm.
At home she has opened the windows, ironed his shirts
and every time he talks too early of growing old
she makes his favourite food for tea. And even though
it doesn’t help, he knows he will not die alone.
About My Tardiness
I have arrived in this world too late
to be anything but a husband who, returning
early from work, unzips her dress from behind
& buries his face in the small of her back,
like a bookmark marking her favourite poem.
I have arrived in this world too late
to be anything but a face reflected
in a lake which, though sometimes distracted
by surfacing fish, practices resembling
a portrait painted by a talented child;
too late to be anything but a vegetarian
whose dogs are also vegetarian, having
actually made the choice themselves,
thus rendering their owner not so much a fanatic
as a person at peace with all animals.
Born by caesarean, who’s to say how many moments
I was robbed of during that numbed
negotiation between womb & world.
Who’s to say what revolutions could have been
attributed to me. As it is I arrived
too late to be anything but a student who,
despite being ignorant of wars & such like,
will frantically sift through history books
seeking something that lends itself well
to learning off by heart.