|
[ issue 1 | poetry samples ] |
GILES GOODLAND
Returns
These clouds were made in America.
This rain-cratered varve
on the car-bonnet that you draw off
with your finger is from the Sahara.
The birds are listing continents.
Your skin appears seamless but
you know it has been manufactured
at great expense, over many years.
As another Sundays shifts an
unpindownable wind across the lawn,
it’s a struggle to plant your feet, to
believe firmly enough you are here.
Even stillness comes in the
shape of a garden that is
crashing through space,
noiselessly, and at great speed.
Clouds were packing up for the day.
The light was negotiable
and you, past your bedtime, broke a puddle
into its constituents of light and cold.
Then, remember: those birds conjuring
from shadows, monochrome geese
prestidigitating. You cast bread
onto the car-park and drew them closer
and behind them, the sky half
visible, off-black, concealed
the arched or squat forms
of further congregations,
and their mirthful stilted talk.
A heron landed in front of us:
a contraption, hinged and
cantankerous, built by impractical gods.
A coot, wrongfooted, tripped
into water, toggled away
with the last piece of white
until it was a flake on a wall
under two coats of paint,
on a house that never was.
* * *
CAROLA LUTHER
Moving House
It began with the owl moving into the attic
under the chimney where wind lived like an animal,
then the mouse and its offspring bedding down
in softnesses forgotten in the cellar,
then spiders, many of them, hanging their shadows
like string bags beneath them, touching toes
with themselves under lintel and eave,
then flies, dead or alive, lining up on the rims
of windows, followed by the flurry of the neighbour,
mute, with her Christmas card The weeping
donkey, then pigeons, whole flocks, and starlings
going nowhere, then the heron elbowing the owl
now withdrawn deep into the pillow of itself
two steps along into the reaches of the garret;
the postman with his post and the ghosts of the few
correspondents and their waiting people, the community
of churches coming in from their lonely plots
guarding the status of steeples on the tops of hills,
the yellowing hills, six of them, raggy and dying,
with their listing sheep and other ragamuffins
of heather, the child and her plastic farm,
the fuming woman, the timid woman, the man
who doesn’t have to say a word to keep them all
schtum, the dog and its limp, the cat, unchallenged
king of the cooling car bonnet, the car beneath
its bonnet, tarmac, oil stain, litter, weeds,
wasps stunned by darkness, damp, mould,
rot, the slow and terrible eating and eating,
until it became clear she’d have to pack up
her tarpaulin and trek Ferreira,[1] gingerly crossing
the stepping stones to a new rectangle of light,
a geometric shape of empty grass to set up home in,
where apart from the wind and the creaking
of stars, it might, for a while, be quiet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* * *
The past’s not a foreign country –
it’s the homeland we fled from,
victims of a system that wouldn’t let us stand still.
And the promised new life? Most days now
you can find us, swapping stories in side-street cafes,
eking out espressos with other exiles,
or kicking the same old anecdotes around
on the dogshit-covered basketball court.
One day of course, we tell each other,
we’ll return to the scenes of previous defeats,
wander through rooms heavy with the dust
of history, laughing or crying with relief
that everything’s just as we left it. And sit tight,
for the knock on the door in the middle of the night.
It’s our secret to keep, to carry close,
the alchemy complete.
No words, but throwing out heat,
our eyes, not lips, indiscreet.
I saw you again last night. The warm wind
was breathing summer into everything
and your face had caught the sun, so I sipped
and crossed over to where the windows,
facing west, were wide open. A Leonard Cohen
song, the one that begins “if you want a lover”,
was winning its battle to be heard against
what passes now for bedsit angst. You could
spend your whole life trying to make those
lines fit, but you just walked on, needing
nothing. Not a driver or a father
or a boxer or a doctor. Still, here I stand.