New Poetries VII

by Michael Schmidt

  like making someone out in fog. We let the moment

  pass, insofar as we have a say, and head

  into the morning with our packs and loaded guns.

  Hothouse

  In the right context, forever can mean

  anything. Completely out of context, it means space.

  How do those houseplants know to grow that way?

  How does my skin know to cool down?

  I write a few words on my hand, including balcony

  and seeds, then think about a torture that involves

  shoots of bamboo. In my new notebook

  I write drown, then on a new line

  get me out of here. Light passes through

  the roof and walls, absorbed into the earth

  and all the contents of the room. How hot’s

  that terracotta get? How flexible’s this

  glass? I picture my veins bursting like an over

  -pressured dam, pouring away, Old Testament red.

  In my new notebook I write Old Testament red,

  then on a new line double doors. I want my notes

  to be a poem about the different kinds of pain –

  loss of love, loss of loved one, etc. – but can’t

  decide on words to rhyme with balcony

  or drown. Some of the trees

  have been constrained so that they grow out

  horizontally, their branches forced

  down by a wire, which I learn later’s called

  espalier. One of the trees appears diseased,

  its leaves dried out and turning brown,

  like hair that changes white after a shock.

  At home I start a poem I expect to call

  ‘Espalier’, about the different kinds of pain,

  their uses, functions, methods, aims.

  In the right context, forever can mean / anything,

  it starts, the summer folding over itself,

  a tropical vine weighed down by its fruits.

  The Excavation

  Then, a few years later, a man came in and slashed the canvas

  with a knife. A statement was released that used the word unbalanced,

  which seemed fair, although we hadn’t had a statement from the slasher,

  who was still detained. When we got home the furniture and wall-hangings

  had gone. The paint behind the frames had not been faded by the light, so

  left an outline of the pictures like a kind of silhouette. I felt surprisingly

  disarmed, like being caught off guard without a good excuse, unable to

  give answers to the simplest set of questions – Who are you? What are you

  doing here? – suffering a period of brief but harsh amnesia. What better

  metaphor than that great city, rising from the swamp, laying its foundations

  on the men who died constructing it? It makes you wonder if survivors

  had a clue what they’d survived, or if the long, fantastic stories told

  by nurses did the trick. One inspector wrote how the drowned horses

  were impossible to count, and that the bridges may as well have been

  constructed out of them. The thing is, as a child, I didn’t know how

  distance worked, that it was somehow linked to passing time and that

  forgetting sometimes meant that you might live through things again,

  like when you feel you’re seeing mountains that you’ve never seen

  before but then you find out from a photograph you came here

  not that long ago. About a year went by in the same way. For them,

  there was a chance to fix up the slashed masterpiece, re-hanging

  it beside a plaque explaining what had happened here. For us,

  there was a chance to catch up on the things we’d missed, doing

  our best to make exceptions for the minute gains and losses of each

  day, which tend to sweep by unannounced the way the wind disturbs

  acres of dunes. During this period we visited Lake Tahoe, which I’d only

  ever seen as a relief map in a restaurant – whose outer walls were made

  of plastic made to look like it was made of wood – or in The Godfather: Part II

  (1974), because it’s where the Corleones have a compound distanced

  from New York. Driving north around the lake’s perimeter, I read aloud

  that its depth is over sixteen hundred feet and that (because the water

  stays so cold) there could be bodies from the fifties down there,

  perfectly preserved. Six yachts were sailing to the state line with their

  fibreglass reflecting light. I had a vision stitched together from stock

  imagery of yachting scenes: mostly bikinis and champagne and people

  diving in slow motion from the yacht into the lake. It all got nasty pretty

  quickly, so I tried to think of something else. As far as I’m aware, though,

  this was years before the news broke out, by which time we were back

  at home. The papers barely covered other stories while the pictures

  started turning up on posters, T-shirts, flags and students’ protest signs.

  Eventually the men came to be discharged from the hospital. It wasn’t

  that they’d all been cured, just that there wasn’t more that could be done;

  it would be years before the fossils were discovered and it all made sense.

  REBECCA CULLEN

  When you live in the same place nearly all your life, you develop ways of seeing the same things differently, but the past remains present. When I started writing, a cacophony of former selves demanded poems. Of these, ‘Pillar Box Dress’ is a contrary sonnet; ‘North Sea’ has a kind of wispy form, somewhere between memory and dream; ‘6 Brunswick Street’ captures that time of freedom in the final year of a degree, revising in the garden with the future shimmering ahead.

  After writing schemes of work, newsletters, briefs and all forms of forms, I wanted to choose what to write, deciding not to write about children or being a mother. This selection, though, reveals children with considerable expertise in hide and seek. ‘Majid Sits in a Tree and Sings’ was written after listening to a Libyan friend speak of the Gaddafi regime. Its short sentences break up the syntax, as though telling the whole story at once would be overwhelming. ‘Crossing from Marazion’ also focuses on an extraordinary child and mother.

  ‘Opening’ and ‘Mother’ were written while I was Poet in Residence at the ancestral home of George Gordon, Lord Byron, Newstead Abbey. It is a wild yet patterned place, and these poems also play with wildness and the pattern of repetition. ‘Opening’ was inspired by a pair of 200-year-old shoes and the mile-long Abbey driveway, its rhododendrons and ferns.

  Several of this clutch of poems are very short, their length falling somewhere between a prayer and a ‘news in brief’ segment. In this context ‘What I see in the Mirror’ is a prayer of thanks for moisturising cream, ‘The Courthouse, Shillelagh’ is a report on the life of a circuit judge, and ‘How to Hang Washing’ is a meditation on finding pleasure in the commonplace.

  Majid Sits in a Tree and Sings

  This morning, I wake with a bird in my heart.

  My mother smiles only for me. I bash my car into the wall.

  Sometimes she tells me to be quiet. Today, she laughs.

  The men came in the hottest part of the day.

  A walk, my love, a small walk, she says.

  In the stairwell, the mothers hold their children.

  The guns shine in the sun. I am a man,

  this is no time for play, I do not hide.

  We shuffle in, look for a seat in the stands.

  A big black bird comes down from the sky.

  The grown-ups hold their breath. They are blinking a lot.

  The bird likes the meat hanging on the goalposts.

  Tonight, my mother says I can sleep in her bed.

&nbs
p; I make my back into a curved shell against her legs.

  She strokes her palm across my forehead.

  In the middle of the night, I watch her on her knees.

  She tips her head backwards. I see all of her neck.

  Mother

  Sometimes she is sick with new children, sometimes she is heavy with old ones.

  Panels hide cupboards stuffed with capes and muffs, stacks of dove-grey boxes.

  Panels hide balding dolls with wrists and ankles creased and fat. In a box,

  there are boots with wooden soles for babies. There are boots for babies,

  with wooden soles. The walls whisper things and promise. Her hands lie loose

  in her lap. Lace droops on her arm. Her door is closed to queues of questions.

  Her hands lie loose in her lap, when they should be busy blanketing or running.

  Her cloth puckers at will, crumples; her palms are too hot, her fingers are too heavy.

  On the table, a pair of silver bird scissors, a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses.

  There’s a border she should be stitching, a border of a blue-winged fledgling.

  Her hands lie loose in her lap. She slips out a child every year from under her skirts,

  imagines every other baby crumpled in a brown paper bag. The walls whisper things

  and promise. There are boots for babies with wooden soles. There’s a border

  she should be stitching. Her hands lie loose in her lap.

  Opening

  My shoes come sleeping in a box.

  I hear them breathe inside the tissue-paper book,

  the sound of rippling leaves.

  The sole is thick alright, like a slab of black tripe;

  the toes are tapered and stopped inside,

  adding another inch – at least – in length.

  Who knows I spade my feet? Kick trees

  until the bark flakes, then blame the deer?

  Who knows I use my shoes to root?

  These are wild shoes

  with points like noses, keen like foxes,

  the leather creased like ears.

  How to Hang Washing

  It must be spring. There should be blackthorn

  blossom, a smudge of sun across your cheek.

  From your patch of earth, you’ll hear the crest

  of chatter from the playground at the school.

  These pegs nip snugly, in time with magpie

  calls, as your arms lift, stretch, clip, repeat.

  What I See in the Mirror

  A deep line that lags my face into a frown.

  The way my cheeks sag, the loss of firm skin

  around my mouth. My neck like a vacuum

  cleaner pipe; a roosting place for flocks

  of chins. In my small sharp eyes, brimming

  with the undertow, the clarity of rage.

  I make sounds like laughter, slightly louder

  and more hearty; scoop hope out of a jar,

  apply a thick layer, nightly.

  Midas

  Your sigh is salt escaping from a cellar.

  You watch the girl with grazes on her knees.

  You are a forest of hands, a nuisance

  in a clearing, stammering a sorry.

  You want the girl to think of you and smile, to be the sand

  she finds in the toe of her shoe long after a holiday.

  As it is, you’re having trouble getting her to understand

  your particular kind of sign language.

  6 Brunswick Street

  Every afternoon now, we hear the clock

  ticking down through next door’s window.

  We’ve pulled the sofa outside, our chairs

  and cups. Bring on the books, we shout;

  John steps out with Beckett on his head.

  We are speaking other people’s words,

  practising our bows. We are cramming

  three years into our skulls, already

  brimming with ourselves. One of Paul’s

  shoes is in the corner. He’s lost the other;

  it doesn’t matter. We’ve been sunning

  ourselves all May, all June. Barely clean,

  completely looking, no one wearing shades.

  Pillar Box Dress

  I come to you with no hope in my knees. We sit,

  make the pub a confessional. Condensation slips

  down the outside of my glass. We’re here again:

  same date, same table, same dress. Bonfire night

  runs in the background, like a television on mute

  during tea. We’re talking in shrapnel. By the time

  my drink is gone, your brother’s waiting at the bar.

  You say something about a spark. I stand, go home.

  I don’t leave drunken messages on your phone.

  I play that song you never liked and sleep sprawled

  across the bed. I keep my head. This much I know:

  I’ll change my hair, you’ll be back by the New Year.

  You’re with the girl whose pout reminds you of Lolita.

  In the morning, I fold the red dress and post it to her.

  The Courthouse, Shillelagh

  In the gardens, a shack no longer full of glass,

  but restored to the small courthouse it once was,

  pocks in the wood where the judge’s ring hit the lid,

  faced with plaintiff and perpetrator. A man of tweed

  and stout boots, travelling the countryside settling disputes

  over the primogeniture of a bull, a badly-tailored suit,

  a grasped boundary or unreturned long-promised favour.

  Still the rain comes, the common denominator.

  Orlando

  after Kim Moore

  I was dry mouthed in the Coliseum while you faced

  the lions, and we read Classics and punted, and foiled

  the mob and kept the diamonds. I wore your shoes

  although they were too small for me, was your amanuensis,

  and we owned a sweet shop, and a bookshop, and you were

  the book I took out and kept, then lent and never got back.

  We lived in frames opposite each other in the long gallery,

  my breeches were plum velvet and you wore a clove

  orange round your wrist, and we ached from quaffing

  sherbet, and hid in the hollow of a tree. We were ravishing

  on chaise longues brandishing gold-tipped cigarettes,

  and hoofers drying out our stockings over the bath,

  and boarders, in the same dorm, floating on our backs

  after a midnight feast, in a natural pool filled by the tide.

  Crossing from Marazion

  I am six when people first begin to stare –

  a boy in man’s clothing,

  children leaping in my footsteps,

  kite-tailing across the beach.

  The mothers stand in doorways, trill

  He must wear his father’s shoes!

  What height will he reach full grown?

  We leave a single track.

  At ten I anchor the village team

  at tug of war. Then I join father

  on the boat, learn to haul creels,

  he says I am worth three men to him.

  The Whit Fair waltzes in

  with whispers of the Show of Freaks.

  The catch is bad. There is a curse.

  My father’s jaw sets firm.

  That night, I see mother trawl her brow.

  At low tide, she takes my hand and we walk the causeway to the friars.

  North Sea

  You stood on my mat in your muddy boots,

  tilting your chin like a dare.

  For two weeks I pined. I was a beach for sweating horses,

  woke with hoof prints on my hands.

  We played ourselves with a bow made from the fine tail-hair

  of a horse running across a beach.

  In the morning, I was shy
of the creature you had made,

  velvet in my ear.

  VALA THORODDS

  Sometimes I think that everything I know about poetry I learned from music – that my poetic education was in fact musical. Growing up I admired my mother’s brothers, who played and sang classical music. I went to a lot of their concerts, saw a lot of operas; sat and watched and listened, as much at intermission as during the performances, and learned about pauses – about the spaces between events, people, notes, breaths. My first love, inconceivably, inevitably, was disco. For years I wanted to be a dancer, and I practised every kind of dance I could find, until puberty hit and I started rowing – that tremendous, meditative dance on water.

  The central concern here is transcendence – and my hope is to evoke, in my poems, the feeling of listening to music or losing oneself in the rhythm of movement. Poetry can do this while accommodating the intellect. If what happens in the mind can be felt as intensely as what happens in the body – if we can, in fact, orgasm in our sleep – then poetry is, whatever else it is, the mind’s way of dancing.

  These poems are concerned with how bodies measure time. They look at the ways in which we are inhabited, but they also seek to inhabit. The spirit dwells in us like a curse or a spell, and these poems try to embody that haunted feeling. Perhaps they seek also to be an incantation themselves, to disarm and entrance like music.