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Jamie McKendrick

ONE DAY

I shall pick up and play the violin
my hopeful great-uncle made for me
out of seventy-odd planished bits of maple,

its scrolled head a ruby-tinted fern.
It sailed across the ocean in a coffin
and is still stretched out in a velvet box,

the E string snapped like a sawn cable.
A musician who played it judged it a fine
big-voiced burly fiddle

though with a wolf note in the upper reaches.
Wolf note to which I’m perfectly attuned.

ON NOTHING

I do not think it is absurd for you to say that nothing is something,
since no one can deny that ‘nothing’ is a noun.
                                                                                    Anselm of Canterbury

If nothing is the opposite of something
then it too is something and not nothing.
Or is that just language rushing in
to fill what makes the intellect recoil?

It’s us not nature that abhors a vacuum,
though in frictionless space there’s still a fraction
more than nothing, if not enough of it
to slow the planets in their orbits.

But the full moon hides its emptiness
and every plenitude its opposite;
the present buckles into nowlessness

that lasts for never as a dark star draws
downward threads of light. There nothing exists,
couching like a sphinx among the rubble.

Claire Crowther

M4, NEAR WOOTTON BASSETT

Slumping in the driver's seat
stretching to reach the steering wheel
staring up through the big screen
holding the slow lane,

there is still a lot to find out
with that logarithmic sense
we keep while we're losing quantity.

Sit up, sit straight when I'm passing.
Remember your warrior version?
I used to hate it.
Now I don't know.

DOWNPOUR

Like the vicar with ten allotments
this surprised me: a lord I met

(maybe a baron, maybe an earl)
where a mist scabbarded trees

with frayed material that fitted
the shape of branches exactly,

said his gift was to spot
from the door, on any surface

of any room in his country
mansion, dust. Myself, I need

to stand in sunlight to see
that silk-unsettling thaw.

CONSIDER YOURSELF TRAINED?

We were very angry, very cold
beside a road that had fallen quiet.

The queue behind was self-controlled
like hungry eaters on a diet.

An old woman was going to miss
a Celebration. We'd come from one.

I could still hear Buddhists chanting
Refuges. A girl who'd gone

brought back a message to us – up
the road there'd been a crash. Our coach

was stuck. Regret was porcelain.
We stamped. The ground took our reproach.

A man spread wide his arms and spoke
poetry, a sort of Tennyson

to the adjacent crossing light,
which was forbidding no one

in red, and allowing none in green:
'Oh amber rest, oh amber rest,'

he charged the inaccurate machine.
It failed, along with us, its test.

Tony Williams

LISTENING

I didn't mean to overhear
the scrape of chair legs on the floor
and sour breath of the bored, enshadowed janitor
nor how he conflabbed on the stairs
(it echoed in the squarish well)
with an ingrate from HR, how you
were falling basementwards, towards
the ferret-sprainted woods where mats
of needles are being disturbed and skulls
of foxes, badgers, falcons, bats and shrews
emerge like eggshells of the news.
I heard the round of sirens in the night,
the airless click of satellites.
I heard the muffle and the timely knock,
the seconds jerking round the clock,
lonely and insomniac,
the sound of no one coming back
to fill and free the lock. I heard
a drunk man shouting COCK
and shrunken voices answering No,
his loiter in the orange yard
and how he turned to go
against a wind that breathed your name.
I heard the water cooler's hiccup send
a bubble of the future up,
an iciness to be my friend,
and how beyond the traffic's burr
your cough performed a Pyrenees of grief
upon a screen – as I was dropping off – I heard,
between the dog barks and the Word of God,
a vixen's scalp-contracting scream.
I heard the silence of the room.
I saw the silence of the moon.

TRAVELLING

Home, what it means to us and to our cousins
beyond the silent edges of sky and moorland,
houses and decors, the gorge that insists upon
a street ending on its knees in the sea, does not
extend as time does and memory pretends across
a garden evenly, unlooked-for fall of snow
in the lonely night. It all depends. The fire's dark grate,
the murder in the quarry, the cowbell of broad beans
hitting the pan's bottom and You and Yours
chattering to themselves in an empty room: nowhere
and nowhen did this happen but to you; was home
for no one else; and blood means nothing. So go there,
test the smell of bacon, read the spines and prints,
tear discreetly at the paper round the switch
to see the years and colours underneath: this pattern,
geometrical, hieroglyphic, reminds me that
Egyptians sent their dead out from the world ensconced
in riches, for that journey like the rest entombed
in dark rooms of inertial objects, homely garlands,
foodstuffs sealed in urns in lieu of those voices.

LAMP. ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

The fields are brown candlewick.
We're warming the earth
after a long and darkish winter.
It's a map of itself.

Standing water, the pools
and the flooded fields, are smashed holes
in the stained-glass green. The black hedges.
By the embankment the stream's

the artist's signature
ruled under by a flat canal.
At this godly height, the trees' skirts
cover their ankles; would they remember us?

There's the huts and halls we constructed,
their ploughed roofs glowering
like the pipes of organs. There's ferns and chervil,
pinked nettles and halberd parsley.

There's the smoke, getting in the way;
a woman, going into the gorse,
and a man, moving towards her.
They seem so far away, those people,

and so strangely dressed. So open.
A numbered sticker on my hipflask.
Our toy sun casts not light but shadow,
a beam of coal-dust playing on the world.

I'd thought I was the bird rising. Now
I see all this wickerwork and think:
it's a funeral pyre. It's chilly. The light
whitens on a land of angles.

Malachi Smyth

TWO UNTITLED POEMS

each night
is grave
unto its day
and what we bury there
alive
is all of ourselves
to only ever
rediscover
in tangent
fragments
fever
reverie
and never sufficiently
(still sometimes too much)
but even I
who rarely dream
and when I do
can’t see the worth
stand in the cemetery
of months gone by
one foot upon the shovel blade
and cry
for what I might unearth

Death’s a mess
But here’s the worst of it:
Decay.
The great humiliation.
Yes, there will come a time
Flies lay eggs
In your head
Get used to it
Maggots need to live too.

I know you say
You’d happily provide a banquet
For a pride of lions
Down on their luck
But such is not your lot
Not even vultures
Praying on your corpse
Nor the jolliest hyena
You are destined for worms
No more
Grubs’ grub
That’s you

 ODYSSEY

disorientation
on an ocean
of neglect
so vast
an insect
on a leaf
I stand
night falls
no sight of land
no bird calls
and the language of the stars is greek to me
which way is east?
and even if I knew,
what course is true?
and have I stores enough to last?
as long as words exist
I will persist
be calmed
by blue
immensity
and when storm-tossed
like Turner
tie myself unto the mast
and revel in newfound expanse
to live
I’ll drink the maddening saline brew
of disembodied texts
and over chew
a stew
of mixed messages
perplexed
ecstatic
vexed
sublime
and revel in expanse
I’ll climb
each wave
I’ll glide
fall
rise
float tall
watch sea and sky elide
and nature bend
and wait
perchance
for Scylla and Charybdis to collide
and ‘til I meet my salty end
I’ll revel in expanse
but can she frighten me away?
not ever
and will I she?
why should I worry if I do?
let love be mightier than fear
or else be shamed
to sink beneath the waves
disconsolate
eternally
and in the meantime silences
I’ll drift
bereft
maybe occasionally
and yet uncannily carefree
recalling horizons
of yore
all narrow
verticals
all obstacles
and in this state
of mind
dictate
in breezy song
to careless winds
the captain’s log:
no sight of land
hoorah
and take my chance
in gods
and devils’
hands
and not be bound
by disbelief
and dance
alone
upon my leaf
and revel
in
expanse

POMPEII

know this
and hold it fast
within your heart
cling to it
as to a raft
on storm-tossed seas
if i cry
it's not for you
but for the death of love
for you the only thing that flows
is bile
it flows
and how
like lava
from an overwrought volcano
like vesuvius awaking
in a fit of indigestion
eyes up from the belly gazing baby
and observe
that's me
on fire
retching magma innards
skywards
now imagine this:
you're pompeii
self-obsessed and decadent
over-confident
suspecting ...
nothing.
look back
look up
into these hills
whose gods
now long forgot
you worshipped once
and brace yourself

John Whitworth

THE PRAYER OF HARRIPU TEKOJAARVI

God of Earth and God of Iron,
God of Fire and God of Fear,
God of Truth and God of Lying.
God of Living, God of Dying,
God of Sword and God of Spear,
God of Zara, God of Zion,
God of There and God of Here,
God of Kent and Worcestershire,
God of Sorrow, God of Cheer,
God of Leopard, God of Lion,
God of Marduk and Orion,
God of Never, God of Near,
      See my prayer like smoke arisen,
      Free my wishes where they wizen,
      Be the soul of my malison,
      Soon, soon, soon.

God of Water, God of Witches,
God of Air and God of Words,
God of Hedges, God of Ditches,
God of Irks and God of Itches,
God of Beetles, God of Birds,
God of Butchers, God of Bitches,
God of Vocals, God of Surds,
God of all Diminished Thirds,
God of Karshish and of Kurds,
God of Scant and God of Riches,
God of Nooses, God of Hitches,
God of Hermits, God of Herds,
      Take a heart that fears to fly now,
      Wake a heart that wants to die now,
      Make a heart one piece of sky now,
      Soon, soon, soon.

THE LOVE BUG

The Love Bug will bite you if you don’t watch out: Fats Waller

Alone in a library a lovely girl
     Begins The Faerie Queene of Spenser,
And as she pushes back an errant curl
     The Imp of Poetry attends her,
Squats by her shoulder, whispers in her ear,
Though what he says to her is far from clear.

Perhaps he instructs her in the Rhymer’s Art,
     His Course in Seven Easy Stages,
Conjuring Artegall and Britomart
     From countless crabbed twin-columned pages,
Perhaps he enumerates her secret sins.
Perhaps that’s why she blushes and he grins.

He grins, she blushes and she’s beautiful
     Entirely – so the poet Auden
Blazoned his sweet boy’s ceremonial.
     For Poetry is Holy Jordan
And she is Poetry, of course she is.
Except that verse is lies, and she’s the biz.

For she’s the Faerie Queene and he’s the frisky
     Rude Mechanic Bottom, waster, weaver,
Wordsmith and manchild, marinate in whisky –
     The Single Malt, the Gay Deceiver,
The Poet’s Passion and the Poet’s Crutch.
He’s onto something but it isn’t much.

What isn’t much is all he’s got, and this,
     The perfect shadow of a sonnet,
Stands for the imperfect shadow of a kiss
     And everything dependent on it,
Counting the moonbeams, swinging on a star,
Etcetera, et-cet-e-bloody-ra.

A SMALL HALF FOR KIT MARLOWE

They that love not tobacco and boies
Are fools. How true how very true.
My song of songs, my joy of joys,
After the fevers and the frets,
The Himalaya of my debts,
This is as joyful as it gets.
My loves all culminate in you,
My Wonderland, my Timbuktu,
My pattern and my equipoise,
My marmoset of marmosets,
My sweet of sweets, my boy of boys,
My Rome, my Babylon, my Tyre,
The pinnacle of my desire
My light of life, my flame of fire,
And sharer of my cigarettes.




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