Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

« Previous item
Contents of this issue
Next item »

Louise Wilford

print this page

Finding the Four Quartets

I found it clearing out the attic room,
a pale blue volume, edges curled with age.
Its pages smelt of candlewax. It opened up,

through habit, at that place – the space before
the poet sets to work, where you had scribbled
‘Love you’ with that pencil used for sketching

thorn trees on the scooped-out slopes of Hoy,
the wafers of the Old Man stacked, the scowling
cattle by the sea’s rough edge. You’d scrawled it

in the toffee-yellow light cast by a caravan’s gas
mantle, huddled in your walker’s coat –
perhaps you wore a blanket too, saving cash

by cutting back on fuel while you stoked
your fantasies, a mug of something steaming,
laced with the Scotch she’d bought.

Once there’d been a letter with your own poem
spilled across its leaves, between the lines,
but that had long since gone. Just ‘Love you’

had survived, the turn of your HB pencil
on the quirky L, the thickening V from the press
of the tip of your tongue on the lead.

What poems do you buy these days? Perhaps
you read your kids to sleep with Possum’s Book
of Cats, or roll the shoulders of her nightgown down

with Prufrock whispered soft against her neck –
or the shirt-sleeved men in windows. Words will do it
every time. The ticking clock, the powdered twilight,

pencil scratches on a fly-leaf. I never read the Four Quartets –
just read and reread all you said in those two worn-out
words, ink slowly fading on my bookshelf twenty years.

 

Page(s) 116-117

Back to top