Two Recordings
I listen in the ivy to a music—
A gift never lost when it plays
Back first in the spirit that it's given,
Talking almost to no-one of nothing nowhere
And never heard before, an evolving arrangement
Of lush, honest, immediate ore—
An address for a domestic
God to dance its ceremony of mere everyday
With willing bodies awake with birdsong before
Sunrise: the same god's monkeys hanging on the first suspension
Bridge of chain links, happy between wine and diesel exhaust;
Between white devils in a row of warm brick
Houses set in snowy fields and black concrete
Progress of glass and steel, debt and the dead
And buried, skins and gourds, shit and a love dream;
Between sleeping lines and a crocodile chest,
Hair glue and wind, sex and sulfur, hammer and clay,
Wattle and daub, easel and albumen,
Negative and canvas, salt and synthetic colours,
Oil blanket and nothing local, cotton and rayon,
Silver and no pose, peace and cloth cash,
The bleaching sun and whitewash
For every spring to decorate
With a letter and appliqued story
Formed in a human profile yet serrated
To prevent disease and printed with children's
Hands for protection, a corncob, the navel
Scarred from giving birth, and a scattering of seeds
In indigo so deep, rich and sweet
It seeps past the hourglass border to make a stream
Taking the wealthy sea to undeserved poverty.
I play back sounds of shells as the healer moves
In waves of circles, diamonds, triangles
And squares strongest in their sense of surface—
White nuts on the black soil, pans and pots
In a string bag, funeral red, safety pins
To count for power, neck of the suicide hero,
Thick wire to hobble a truck, mistakes crossed
Intentionally for beauty, mother snake fierce for her eggs—
Uneven texture, zig zag, bump, dent, dot:
The difference to continue
Beyond the untriumphant and innocent origin,
The despair of imitating only less,
The deserter's death sentence,
And neither woman nor man secure without a chain
And an end to hold fast to the spiral
In and out, the roads and branches of need
And fullness within the ivy
Of this address and its domain.
Page(s) 9-10
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The