Kitchen Design
A pot sink please, white and deep, standing on stone flags
or redbrown tiles. The cold tap gushes a white cascade,
scouring the slightly pitted base and corners, or it can
pour a fall straight as a pipe. Its sound is a duet,
small percussion and one flute in its mid range
fluttering on a low ground: inversion, echo, cadence.
High windows show trees close by, tipping mosaic blue
down though the green: on the sill one rough pot
(or dented copper jug) brandishes yellow daisies.
The table is oak (or beech), chairs broad and easy.
Things in drawers lie in the repose of sufficient space,
handles smooth and large: they clatter like cool bells.
The only fabrics are pudding cloths and one clean towel.
To make bread, a roomy warming place by the oven,
a wooden surface for kneading. Stainless steel
(and perhaps pewter) for water and wine, and for food
heavy pots, plain vessels of all kinds, a joke of vessels
stacked in green shuttered cupboards.
The oven (it burns any fuel) is built heavy, bolted,
growing from the flag floor, giving a concentration
of contained heat, honest and fierce, unfanned.
The room is held quiet in the fresh life of air.
There may be a black dog by me, but no telephone.
That’s the plan, Sharon. Thank you for ringing.
Page(s) 8
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