The space itself has the feel of something imagined or something not quite recognised, like getting to your destination and feeling you are still in the place you departed from. Or like returning home and finding no house there, no street, no pavement lined with hedges, your town not even mentioned on the regional travel map.
9
The light is like something only dimly understood.
The light is like greaseproof paper.
11
The chairs are the colour of blue chocolate-papers. The departures board is unreadable. The ceilings are low.
The light is like a kind of lengthy explanation – the light is like two thoughts occurring at once.
13
The fluorescent yellow lighting in the upper-storey corridors is not absolutely like anything you remember.
14
That feeling of sourness you get in the gut, stepping onto a descending escalator, is not unrelated to that trembling sensation – that other feeling you sometimes get – of actually being two places at once.
This is probably something it is better not to talk about.
17
The first thing is how much the light from the chandelier brings to mind a pan of bubbling caramel chocolate, and the other’s the way the angles of the fluorescent ceiling-tubes are like something from the diagram page of an organic chemistry textbook.
18
Sometimes the light is a soft vanilla-colour; sometimes it is a colour like the yellow of an egg.
21
Waiting out the morning in the roped-off restaurant area, the feeling of looseness and unreality that keeps on bringing us back to ourselves is not unrelated to the certainty we feel as we sit and watch the planes pulling off into the distance, that if we fix our eyes on the names painted along the bodies of the aircraft then we will continue to be able to read those words, never losing focus as the planes become speckles in the vivid deep blue of the sky.
This is nothing much more than a trick to do with distance, like the way our childhoods fasten themselves in the memory always just so far off, so they never seem any more distant or any less real, though further and further away from us they grow.
Warmth comes like a murmur, and the minutes go round. The sunlight at the windows is like honey and butter.
24
The middle-morning sunlight, becoming bluish against the windows, creates simple shadows on the sand-colour flooring.
We sit at a table and speak in low voices, and ask for coffee and new ashtrays and paper serviettes.
Matthew Welton (2009)
Photographs, Undeveloped
Somewhere a tourist book was warning the reader that this capital was grey. I depicted it. I saw a grey childhood. Swinging the Soviet Horizont in one hand wandering amongst art nouveau houses shooting around down town. Under arches of courtyards black and white: those films I have never developed. What I mean is I have never taken them to the shop. I did not need to. What I mean is I did not need to see them at all.
My mother in that other era used to sit on the roof drawing the passing sky on her own. Her hair was thin, uncut, colourless. She needed to climb up the ladder to get up there to the loft and from there to the top onto the tiles. Later she used colours. But in that era those colours became neutral on the paper; I don’t mean decolorized. That era was neither toneless nor grey. It was a thick white glass. Through that glass was my mother observing those clouds, I think.
Much later, in another millennium, I saw those galleries on a poster. The grey capital’s apartments on sale. But it was in a different country. What I mean is that it happened in another century. What happened in another century in another country? I think it is ‘it’ I talk of that occurred then between the black and the white. If anything this capital is in-between. It is painted naught, or it was. Light yellow, in January, when you look out of the train pulled by the rails, no, not too fast.
Why were we both disloyal? What I mean is why do we not live in the place, no matter where, that we actually live in? We meet here three times a year waiting for each other behind bins lining the dark at night. It is cold. A January. A January just before Christmas is what I mean. It is such a Christmas is what I mean. Those bins happen at each corner. One after another you hide from me and ask me to do the same for you. There is no plan in the future and so you leave the country on Christmas day.
Take the train to the border. What I mean is that border drawn between two pine-trees. They are pines of the same woods, of the same pine. In-between; take a walk in tomb-land where veterans of the Alps, of the same land of the same woods, still assemble from time to time. The bones used to be scattered. Sporadically. I see. Now … martially renovated stones … I fit my soles in your traces on a path of our sledge you used to pull in the snow. Forgive me if I don’t spend any more time with you here. What I mean is don’t I spend more time with you spending time with ghosts?
Don’t blame the signs of the galleries in St Paul’s. What I mean is there are no circular walls that could bring those voices back. We left them there in that discoloured era. Or is it that they only whisper in that white coloured glass? Leave the domes’ troubles to the domes. And the trams’ to bridges that can hold them no longer. I think domes should not talk at all and should not fool their visitors who pilgrimage from far-off lands, from black and white capitals. From white glass coloured capitals. From grey capitals.
Ágnes Lehóczky (2008)
from Folklore
20
All week they screw in the yellow bulbs red ones. Round in their hands. All the morning & talks. Saw them driving geese, the chicken men. Down from market. Greys and then orange beaks. The sound of their feathers. The heat inbetween. Holds a goose egg still warm. Electricity all over the May Fair. The lights on the cobbles.
You walks & breathe sugar in. Stares into the metal. They revolve & your teeth ache. Yellow lights make you sick. Footsteps on the uneven street. Wood and its stuccoed walls. Perspiration running down. The boys they all. Come down the street towards the wall of death all for fights &.
All I have is a hand. Coin passing from.
The big wheel arcs over and over the house & chained library &. Comes for you round & behind then the city. The little lights narrow. The wrought iron steel, below. Above them then. Castor & Pollux. The noise of the pump organ goes. Over the fields & houses & out. Rows then cells settle then darkness oaks and the black bluff of Hay. Black behind black then. Farewell to all stars.
Tongue in my tongue. It comes up on the wheel. Hanging out of our fingers. The cherry paint flakes. Ringing round. The drawn daggers hit cards. All from here. 3 through the heart’s mark. Steer into each other’s legs & the waltzer & on off & on. The darts diamonds hearts. The wall of death steals. Our breaths. One more time.
Hit a fox on the road. Halfway home. The lights go up dancing and after.
Inside the darkness, colour.
Tim Atkins (2008)
Edith
She was late home, she had gone out in an invitation blouse, a post-work spritzer, & this whole creamy twin-set she liked. She was advertising a hot political look. She was an idiot, she was Freud, she was a sex fiend. She was, in truth, nothing more than a discontinued type-cast made of polyester. She was responsible for all of January’s inverted oppression. I was in thrall. She came at me with this smooth, military [slash] corporate ‘cop-a-feel’ attitude & I let her, quaking in my rebel boots. She cast a dark shadow over this love story that was going to practically write itself – this girl Tracey I was after – she was – never mind. She sugared up every young protégé, then left them on the seedy corner she found them. Plus, she had made Ginny all sore, sort of inside her heart, that’s what Lisa had told me. I thought how can she get away with this shit, with all this blabber in town? But I fell for it hard, ignored all the salt-lick metaphors. So we went back to hers, pulped all these ideologies, these texts, & I sculpted her body with them, around this mesh we got from the borderland fence. We ate hard
-boiled eggs in the morning, talked about categories, drew up lists of everyone we knew. She did my makeup and hair to look like hers, gave me these little ballet pumps & threw my boots out the window. She was magic, & waited 3 weeks to drop me, the best 3 weeks of my life.
Sophie Robinson (2008)
The Wren
for V.
This will be your last life here. I see a dropsy helicopter, choring along. A heron like a sickle reaps an Iron-Age sun. I see a Caravan. You’ve been travelling on your own but – Dear God – like falling face down into warm mud, this is love – the sudden, muddy sun.
You have the Polytunnel. Something about you will need protecting. A bust creel’s a debt. You have a debt … doesn’t everyone? Money is a pile of anything. Cabbages mean money as manure does. Cool leaves creak between your palms in the evening. It’s enough. Pull one.
I see the Wren. Behind and before, above and below you. That’s luck. And under the sun, the Dark-Haired Hammerer. In the gleaming grass, the ducks will gleam like curling stones. You’ll get off scot-free, trusting everyone.
You will love the land. You will love the land like a bairn. The Hammerer. The Wren. The dropsy helicopter choring along. The heron like a sickle reaps an Iron-Age sun.
Jen Hadfield (2008)
from Bird bird
Troglodytes troglodytes (wren)
Must work without the wren their shiny coats there their fat small hands. They once were kind. Once they all faced the same way and sang. Once. Doubtful bird you have seen. The word that the wren said: ‘shoes!’ A wren doesn’t cost any money. There! There! Dipping in northern europe. The story of its longer wings from england. Must buy ham. This will not be liked much either. Under the tractor I shoved it in her hard but each take was spoiled by the king wren. Tit parties in winter, small loose parties erupting westwards sometimes high up. Golden england. Down and down newington butts caught moths with the smaller birds, again wren-like. Wren as host, magpie as host, above whose clashing hands, business-like, now a wren costs a few pence.
Apus apus (swift)
Easily told around the houses and they went this way looking like quick and brown, the same as before only going. Going to a roding valley there to feel for the wrong bee. A fish carried forward in the hand, to soothe. There in time to motley. The head to lead to the circle. They fell down rhyming, lightly come, like a man at things in a wood. A poetry ring recent and wet. The point is outside and in, though scarcely so. Like scarcely weeping, or scarcely so. From town to form, from place to position. Or grazing on each other they work the suburb to a thin.
Coccothraustes coccothraustes (hawfinch)
That tapping. It’s the rain or the rainiest day that nobody looked at the hawfinch and it’s like a dixons in the springtime. It’s massive its head in a conifer belt. We have streets and we have a dixons. We have streams and houses and fields on the borders of woods and we have like a dixons. That’s where your iPod is. Like there was this shy gardener found with sixty iPods. Much more like that because he so rarely mixed with them. I mean the finches. Got to get to take them from the city for the white phase that they utter in. I mean again the finches. It’s so dark it passes. The lores as they slide over each other. That’s where your mouth is. Finches and iPods interchangeably. And that tapping. It’s so thin it must be a display.
Jeff Hilson (2008)
The Hornsman
I was asleep, I remember that, when I first heard the sound of the horn. A thin, far-away simple horn-call – it gently woke me, and remained with me, awake. I stumbled across the room, thinking of strange alarm clocks, unusual mobile phone tones …
But this was a quite unusual tone – a two-note motif with a repeating rhythm, rather like ‘aha! … aha! aha!’ There was something classic in it, not the tinny precision of pre-recorded electronic farce, but a richer reality, friendly, urgent, as of a miniature cascade of harmonics, faithful but very, very remote – in a neighbouring valley or a distant cell?
There was only my one room. I shook myself alert, and fixed my eyes on the model watchman chess figure above the dud fire. He was only a copy of course, of some hand-worked Anglo-Norse original, perhaps three inches high, standing in fixed resin form, blank eyes pointed toward me. Yet, I thought, the sound had come … inside the room certainly … from this direction?
I looked more closely, as though daring him to repeat his call to life. From the top of a round turret, the body of the watchman was in place, a veteran soldier on an easy but important duty. He had a fine moustache, flowing down into a beard; it was a cold dawn, maybe, where he lived, for he had a top tunic and also a cloak with its hood folded down behind; and a helmet, as if danger might be at hand, should be expected, as I was expecting it.
The instrument was little more than a wide curve, an animal horn inverted, and the tip cleared away to admit rasping breath. The tip was in his mouth. He blew.
Suddenly I saw.
I dashed across the room, opened the drawer, clawed out the Christmas bauble, and launched it mercilessly out through the top window I kept open this night and every night. In just that flash of time before the rams began to batter in the front door and vizored police, no inch of human left about them, grabbed their way in and flattened me to the floor.
Bill Griffiths (2008)
from The Idylls
1
One day the men were repairing the fence by the stream in the Bawn. Moss drove in the stakes with the sledge, while my father followed with Dan-Jo unwinding the barbed wire and stapling it loosely to the timber. Then the strands were pulled taut by the three men and made secure.
‘We haven’t seen or heard a soul all day,’ my father remarked. ‘Not even a tramp or the youngsters from school.’
‘Everyone goes round by the road nowadays,’ said Dan-Jo.
‘And there’s no work in the fields any more. No beet to thin. No sheep to count. No hay to turn and cock and wind.’
‘Once you’d have seen twenty men and women in a field at harvest time.’
‘Do you remember the pony races, Moss?’
‘I do. The water jump was there by the alders and then the last jump was into Dillon’s Field. The finishing post was by where the pylon is today.’
‘The field black with people.’
‘You’d see folk in the fields,’ my father continued, ‘whatever job you were at. Sometimes you’d meet a total stranger and they’d stop to talk.’
‘I drove a pick-up through Manitoba,’ Jo said, ‘and neither man nor animal did I see for three days.’
‘In the forestry,’ Moss said, ‘you’d be on your own a lot of the time. Though you’d hear an axe or a saw from the next section and you’d be glad of that.’
Maurice Riordan (2007)
Blue Dog
The blue dog is made of plastic. It is no more than two inches high. The blue dog is a pug and sits on its haunches. It is what she has been looking for all her life. ‘You remember being a child, don’t you?’ she asks me. This is what I remember about being a child: Rows of horror films by the counter in the video store.
‘No blue dogs,’ I say.
‘But I am in love with the blue dog,’ she says. ‘Don’t you remember taking joy in the smallest things?’
‘I have learned to group those things together,’ I say, ‘and take joy in none of them.’
‘This is why we have wine connoisseurs and restaurant critics,’ she continues, ‘film makers and English teachers. This is why we have bird-watchers and moth-catchers, professional sports players and magazine journalists. When people say: Everyone is searching for something, they are talking about the blue dog and all that it could once evoke.’
The little blue dog sits proudly in the middle of the table. I consider snatching it – and throwing it in a river, or melting it. Perhaps it is the way I am glaring at the blue dog – or perhaps, as I suspect, it is that she is so highly strung she can practically read my thoughts.
‘If you ever take the blue dog a
way from me,’ she says, ‘I will cry. I won’t want to live anymore.’
‘You think I’m a monster, don’t you?’ I say, addressing the question to the blue dog.
Luke Kennard (2007)
If
If you open your mouth, ache. If you don’t open your mouth, swelter. If you open your mouth but hold your breath, ether. If you look for colour, coral and tea leaves. If you follow the moon, wet and concrete. If you cling to the earth, pistol and candy apple. If you give up your garden, maze and globe, hydrangeas and moonvines. If you lose your shoes, pumice and strain. If you have no money, tin, linen and clang. If you lie down with dogs, pale and tender. If you watch television, carrot and yanking. If you embrace nothing, lustre and tar. If you know sorrow, whistle and salt. If you lie down with birds, currents and vertigo. If you can, software and lingerie. If you should, totem, forelock, tibia and stamen. If you are blonde, topple, flax, moraine. If you love flowers, do not fold. If you follow the sun, straw and oval. If you hide, velvet and myrrh. If you are a redhead, pepper and artichoke. If you eat only limes, Knossos and paddle. If you sing, ozone, crackle and stir. If you are wanting, scathed and shrouded. If you open your eyes, salt lick and clover. If you lie down with cats, ankle and dock. If you follow your heart, sledgehammer. If you embrace all, oarlock and tidal. If you look for light, spleen, splint. If you follow the earth, spade and compass. If you lie down with fish, ice cube and convection. If you know anger, detonate and flex. If you give up walls, columbine and feather. If you are still here, present and peel, dandelion and lemon hound.
Sina Queyras (2006)
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem Page 8
