Summer Poetry Feature, Part 2: Wright, Gillam, Edgar, Mittal, Page, Reeves, Hecq [01.12.2011]
Summer is. And so are these poems – here and now – for your reading pleasure. Part 2 of 4 to the SPUNC Summer Poetry Feature is below. If you missed them, be sure to have a read of our Winter and and Spring features as well.
Part 1: Skovron, Middleton, Spence, Mahemoff, Lowe, Brown, Curnow
Part 2: Wright, Gillam, Edgar, Mittal, Page, Reeves, Hecq
Part 3: Lloyd, Clemens, Caddy, Ryan, Cooke, Rowland
Part 4: Cronin, Hill, Sant, Shapcott, Collins, Gorton, Shepherdson
Courthouse Afternoon ~ Fiona Wright
for Tara
A girl in coral and horn glasses
is discussing the relative frequency
of her massages and orgasms,
and how protein shakes
are made from cattle hearts,
and how the sniffer dogs
might find the Valium in her handbag.
It’s an Indian Summer, and the fairylights
asphyxiate a tree, the bistro buzzers
skitter on the tabletops
and she leans in close,
and chews her plastic straw
and lets her eyes grow wide
on the nervous man beside her.
She tells him
about a recent wedding, where both parties
looked like they were eight months pregnant
and how she’s never understood
why lemons cost much less than limes
and that she’s still black and blue
from horse-riding
and this pub really changes of a Friday
and she never should have listened to her mother.
Three women haul their prams onto the balcony
and shake bottles of formula
and order bloody marys.
A girl in horn-rimmed glasses and coral nails
grabs the man beside her by his nervous hand
and leads him out into the street.
This poem appears in Fiona Wright’s collection, Knuckled, published by Giramondo Publishing.
(for the siblings) ~ Kevin Gillam
they are there on the cusp of a
little hill, in the trampled splendour
of a suburban yard. they are three,
elephantine trunks standing against a
background of untidy sky, their oily
confidences drab on Escher limbs,
and the still bricks and lost pickets
heighten the haecceity of these three.
I go and sit with them often. I sit
between them, face to a bleary just-risen
moon and while breathing deeper and deeper
I find a kind of un-stringed puppetness
owning me. everything around them is
not tinted, a landscape of slow bleeds
with aching grace: the cusp where they stand,
splashes of buffalo, pot-bellied air,
the impressionist light. some spire in a nearby
church tolls its god, and in the corduroy silence
that follows, this join-the-dots man of me
forgets numbers, this seep of leaving
rooted in turn in the clear outline of these three
draws me towards them. having no need for eyes
I follow the scent of sweet decay,
let my soles find exposed pasts, and since
no-one is around, I brush my cheek
across them, hold them, press my chest
against them, know their ribbed unknowns
This poem appears in Kevin Gillam’s collection, Permitted to Fall, published by Sunline Press.
Summer ~ Stephen Edgar
A spiritless, grey-lit interior,
Midafternoon, the nadir of the day
When visitors are scarce; as in a mime
Silence informs the empty corridor,
Making all sound extraneous, far away,
As though it were the memory of time:
A closing lift, a nurse’s wordless voice
Monologizing on the office phone
Offscreen, the metal rattle of a trolley
With all it offers those without a choice,
And somewhere hard to judge the sullen drone
Of a polisher spreading its melancholy.
Wards open to the left and right, from which
The stillness wells like stage mist. Ranged in beds
Lie figures from the London underground
By Henry Moore, while in a curtained niche
An intimate family group with half-bowed heads
Out of Renaissance art sits gathered round.
As in a nightmare loop the eye regards
The bowls of grapes, the bunches of bright flowers
(Watered by someone once who then ignored them),
The drinking vessels and the get-well cards
Again, again the faces drained of hours,
Emptied by their waiting even of boredom,
Subsisting in their realm of four o’clock.
Procedure rooms pass by, and linen stores,
And stores for dressings, cannulas, syringes,
And blank, shut rooms where no one comes to knock.
Glimpsed from a junction in the corridors
What seems a painting down the hall impinges
Into the atmosphere, although the glare
That pullulates across it from the lighting
Wipes out its subject from the dazed newcomer,
Till he approaches closer to that square
Of tell-tale glass, which stares clearly reciting
The myth of an outer world; its content: summer.
Who would have thought that blue could hurt so much?
This prospect also has forgotten time:
Along the shore the many-lacquered frieze
Of small waves lays a stationary touch;
The trees, as though self-mesmerized, all climb
Unmoved, you’d say, into a printed breeze
In which the yachts, remnants of an event,
Have long been left behind. Almost without
A cloud, the unimagined sky annuls
All qualms across the bay’s embellishment
Which it exults
above — except, far out,
A white dismay among the feeding gulls.
This poem appears in Stephen Edgar’s collection, Other Summers, published by Black Pepper Publishing.
sound (& silence) ~ Pooja Mittal
terrible silences speak to me—
terribly pale silences, soft as the faces of new pigeons.
under the arch of an upturned sky
the rain collecting (wet-feathered coin-glitter) in endless gutters.
slow aggregate of things
that shine, that refuse to shine.
breaths suspended, crossed arms of branches
suddenly deprived of clothing—
the nude earth
aching
like a young bride.
stripped & open, foot & soil
indistinguishable from mind—this downpour relentless
as the clatter of abandoned weapons. knife-quick,
bird-voices hide & reveal themselves.
sleight of hand, a shifting veil,
a stifled breath, a touch withdrawn.
terrible silences. across chasms of nearness,
between blades of grass, these silences
speak to me—agonizingly thin
as the voices of infants, all-encompassing as dusk,
merciless as dawn.
This poem appears in Pooja Mittal’s collection, Subliminal Dust, published by Odyssey Books.
Audiology ~ Geoff Page
The winter shrubs are
crisp with wrens.
Wire brushes on a snare
are suddenly a
well-heard whisper.
It’s not a miracle exactly
but something very close.
The world retrieves its
rustled paper,
the sibilance of
jingled keys
as now I start to hear my shoes
complaining on the gravel.
My typing turns as brittle as
an office full of clerks.
Max Roach playing cymbals
leaves his fretwork in the air.
The sound of Clifford Brown on trumpet
is sweet and clean as first I heard it
fifty years before.
The world seems more
transparent now,
thinner than a leaf.
This poem appears in Geoff Page’s collection, A Sudden Sentence in the Air, published by extempore.
House of Ash ~ Lyn Reeves
My house burnt down.
I couldn’t do a thing about it. I just sat there
looking out the window while it burned.
It started in the bedroom. The smell of smoke
had been around for months, years maybe,
but it didn’t set alarm bells ringing.
Smoke clung to the curtains. The smouldering
mattress scorched the sheets. A sooty film
grimed the windows and the walls.
My skin paled with the slow drift of ash.
It brittled my hair. The taste of cinders
parched my mouth. Words began to blaze.
They flared up wantonly, igniting spotfires.
As fast as I put one out,
sparks flickered in another room.
Perhaps it was a fault in the wiring, or
the too-bright light through a magnifying lens, or
the piles of crumpled poems on the floor — good kindling.
The sun was a crimson disc and the moon promised no rain.
Tears couldn’t stifle the flames.
They only drove them underground
where they devoured the foundations.
I kept looking out the window.
No firemen came with bright red engines and vanquishing hoses.
No water bombs dropped from above.
The house continues its long slow smoulder
until everything I touch crumbles
the heart hollowed right out of it.
Now I live in a house of ash
alert to the slightest wind.
This poem appears in Lyn Reeves’s collection, Seasoned with Honey, published by Walleah Press.
from Out of Bounds ~ Dominique Hecq
Incarnadine Sun
The skin of day bursts
A wild goat leaps off the page
Word parola Wort mot woord –
a dice throw cast in jest –
a tongue in free fall –
images adjust to words:
things said
things utterly written
Where do words come from?
From behind an eyelid
the world slows down
silence swaps
the living with the dead
the mother with the child
the dead for the living dead.
Is language the world?
Washed out Moon
Milk letters spilled
in mid air song
High up in the mountains she drops and falls in a mirror you call a lake.
Her eyes are split and so is her face. Her skin is inside out. Burning. Freezing.
She swims in air solid as glass, glimmering as silver.
She wheels herself back through a field of rocks to what you would call home.
She is all shivers and sweat. Her voice booms in her chest. Her head.
Husks. Her heartbeat is strong. Is weak. Is no more.
How long must i wait for this death to come, she asks – for this death to go?
In a foreign tongue she hears that she is not prepared.
This excerpt is the opening lines to Dominique Hecq’s collection, Out of Bounds, published by Re.Press.
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