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QUALM  Sept 2003


Les Murray


WALLS OF THE PEOPLES

The Great Wall of China
was built on ridgelines and blood
between the weeders and the gallopers

and soon poured across by both.
It is said to be the only
man-made thing visible from space.

Not true. Nearly everything is,
space being just a hundred kilometres
up from everywhere.

This wall was to separate
high cuisine from tent cauldrons,
marshalled text from shaman chants

and exams from that horizon mood
which welcomes things from space: cats, opium,
Antarctica, polyphony, unbound feet.

ON THE NORTH COAST LINE

The train coming on up the Coast
fitting like a snake into water
is fleeing the sacrificial crust
of suburbs built into fire forest.
Today, smoke towers above there.

We've winged across sills of the sea
we've traversed the Welsh and Geordie
placenames where pickaxe coughing
won coal from miners' crystal lungs.
No one aboard looks wealthy:

wives, non-drivers, Aborigines,
sun-crackled workers. The style
of country trains isn't lifestyle.
River levees round old chain gang towns
fall away behind our run of windows.

By cuttings like hangars filled with rock
to Stroud Road, and Stratford on the Avon,
both named by Robert Dawson, who ordered
convicts hung for drowning Native children
but the Governor stopped him. God

help especially the underdogs of underdogs
and the country now is spread hide
harnessed with sparse human things
and miles ahead, dawning into mind
under its approaching cobalt inked

Chinese scroll of drape-fold mountains
waits Dawson's homesick Gloucester
where Catholics weren't allowed to live.
There people crowd out onto the platform
to blow smoke like a regiment, before windows

carry them on, as ivory phantoms
who might not quip, or sue,
between the haunches of the hills
where the landtaker Isabella Mary Kelly
(She poisons flour! Sleeps with bushrangers!

She flogs her convicts herself!)
refusing any man's protection
rode with pocket pistols. Which
on this coast, made her the Kelly
who bore alone, when it was real,

the guilt of European settlement.
Now her name gets misremembered:
Kelly's crossing, Kate Kelly's Crossing
and few battlers on this train
think they live in a European settlement

and on a platform down the first
subtropic river, patched velvet girls
get met by their mothers' lovers,
lawn bowlers step down clutching their nuclei
and a walking frame is hoisted yea! like swords.




Glyn Maxwell


AN EARTHLY CAUSE

Because against the brown of the wide heath
out there that afternoon the shape was small
and pallid, bare and still,
it could have been a body: for a while
it was. When it resolved
into a pair of them, the pair of us

fell to explaining them: that they were young,
no second thought, that they were girl and boy,
they did appear to be,
in love of course, to sit so far away,
to have walked so far in such
persistent heat, to have so very far

to trek back to this path was a notch for love.
We had had days of sun and weeks of sun.
If this affair began
when that began, that would have seemed a sign,
a deal of two good hands,
a garden tended for them. As the dawns

continued foggy, burning off by nine,
belief would harden to a sense of fate,
in retrospect at that,
noon their witness, noon their intimate,
passing them ahead
to noon again, till what they'd happened on

would seem to have been waiting. Such a faith
can make it to the winter, but the days
continued hot. Today
was one of them, incensing heat, a sigh
that is all s. Our minds
were on to them, we couldn't let them be,

not now. Their attitude, in the tall tale
we spun as we walked on, should sour and turn
against the light, the sun
itself fall into question, a dry plain
spread before them, distance
measure what they had. If the heat stayed

relentlessly they'd find an earthly cause
at hand to blame, associate their lives
with that, hear old beliefs
and blush to. They were picking up their stuff
by now: we hurried on
along the path in patterns of late sunlight.




Jack Beeching  (1922-2001).  Three late poems.

SNOWFALL

Snowfall, extravagant in its caress,
puts a white clench on every twig and bud,
leopard to linger along sinking branches,
frozen white fur to crenellate the mud.

Spring rituals of plough and secateur
had just begun, the day that Charlotte painted
blossom to look like snow. Her hand felt cold.
Time took a turn. That night, the snow decanted.


A SEAMOUSE FEARS A CATFISH

A seamouse fears a catfish, and the starfish
yearns for the firmament. Anemones
wave petal fingers, even torpid seaweed
predicts the weather. Solitary crab
wears armour, squid could sign his name in ink.
Language emerged from whale trump and bird cry.

Some came half-heartedly out of the sea,
touched by the ebb and flow of tidal wave,
birth twice a day. A fish flew in the air
to dive back like a bird, a giant whale
gobbled shrimpling, ancient shark smelled blood
and spent millennia as scavenger.

Shore was a frontier between then and after.
Cold blood grew hot there, crawlers found their feet,
matricide now: from this white foreshore wave
no birth of goddesses, along the tideline
plastic strangles inkfish. Oil on water
traps childhood, seabirds, Venus and tomorrow.


CHEWING BUTTERSCOTCH

His head dropped off, and fell into his lap;
hinge at the neck no longer took the strain.
He was a stiff, unbending sort of chap,
a man inclined to overdo his nap.
His open mouth fell downwards on his crutch
though all done neatly, and he felt no pain.
His wife soon put his headpiece on again.
He looked like someone chewing butterscotch.




Peter Reading.  Ten untitled poems.


Mister, we are worse than the excrement of hogs
(which does nothing wrong,
but only enriches the earth),
for we crack on rocks the backs
of our supertankers
(which we dispatch
despite our retrospective intelligence),
and thereby, for reasons of avarice,
precipitate extirpation.

Today, once more,
extirpation...

Well, Mister, as I have elsewhere remarked,
it is a fucking good job
that it all doesn't matter.





  Dusk falls: young girls,
  water-chestnut
  gatherers, pass;

an old calligrapher
  (moon frosts his room)
  confronts a page
  stubbornly blank.





This Sixth Molar,
molested unmercifully
by years' ravages,
abstract it, Dentist, please -
first bit of the whole foul heap
to go for good.





A spectrum sphere, child's blown bubble,
incongruously wafts past a window
of the Globe where we imbibe while we may;

a bewildered sparrow flackered through
the fleeting vigour of a once great mead-hall.





  This morning he scrawled
one Haiku of no merit.

  This falling darkness:

that of which he is able
is a failed Tanka only.





   Dawn's lume,
bakers' ovens' fragrance:

   new bread -
we live for one day more.





As Artemis or golden Aphrodite,
Penelope shone there on his return.

[But men age quickly in adversity.]





   My guide to me:
"This subfusc flumen,
   so soon traversed,
may not be recrossed."





He is reading to his wife:
approaching the fiction's end,
   he decelerates -
who does not regret last lines?





We have ditched most of the draff:
the unbidden spineless books,
the grot-gathering gubbins,
the outvogued vestments,
the cracked crockery,
the pot pig moneybox,
the Morecambe Bay mug,
the vintner's final demand,
the last-but-one's divorce papers,
the last home's deeds,
the chimp's wizened scrotum souvenir,
world's gear,
the bulk of the whole fucking shitheap.

That which remains is a cleared desk
and a time of appointment.




Simon Carnell


CLEY-NEXT-THE-SEA

Take the long approach,
                        by foot through reed beds,
the sea seeming to get further,
                        everyone you pass
with pairs of identical toy dogs on a leash.

Once through the car park,
                        which someone has a franchise on,
and has built a kind of cafe in -
                        in a hut on top of another hut
- the beach is several floors

of steep tide-formed terraces,
                        half a dozen fishermen
with fixed rods and lines
                        spread out at regular intervals,
earthing them to the sea.

Gulls fish at the limit of naked eyesight.
                        The keep-nets
will show no evidence of fish.
                        But oddly, amongst the wrack:
an empty still shrink-wrapped

supermarket carton, with a label saying:
                        ‘fresh mullet’.
That day, as she sorts through
                        pebbles to pick out
only the roundest (such richness requires

specialisation and focus) the sound
                        of the sea breaking on stones
will be a pitch or two from tearing
                        the mesh that binds -
and exhilarating for no reason.

Then just faintly boring.... Try to skim
                        stones that just sink
in the swell. Only one, in a lull,
                        will skip five or six times,
seeming to contravene a basic law.


SPRING STORM EMBLEMS IN GREEN END

Bewilderment of the fallen rook chick that’s mistaken
the bars of a drain cover for the twigs of its nest.

‘Profligate’ spring scatterguns its short-lived leverets
and one-night-stand apple blossoms on the wind -

as gravid, as glorious, as gory as Victorians
burying six or seven from their nine or ten -

or the menfolk of villages marching to manure
sprays and rashes of paper poppies in a field of jackets.

The drenched hare-brained form-hugging hare that sits
to take its shower of pesticides like a man.

Other emblems here! A pair of greenfinches and a swallow
in Green End, dipping over a field of still green corn.

The blue and brown of a three months’ daughter’s eyes -
uncertain after whose, if after anyone’s, to turn.

QUALM  March 2004


Harry Clifton


CAUL

I was wrapped in mine
On arrival, and it hit me,
The orange undersea light
Of the day of birth.

I was safe, though,
Unafraid of drowning
In the strange, new element
I had dropped into,

A man in a bathyscape
Of throwaway skin,
Old veins, post-natal,
Making his way in the world.

Some spoke of greatness,
Others of safety at sea.
Of the lying-in ward
Three pillars remain

And a great emotion.
Mother, am I beloved,
Or who else wears it now,
My dried skin cap,

For luck, on another ocean?


THE AIR MOUNTAINS

They are his mountains, the Air Mountains,
And they hang there, in childhood
And old age, and everything in between
Is a mirage, though he does not know it -
The wadi where he grows, the chequerboard of green

That is high Numidia. Bishops and proconsuls
In an immemorial game. The grafted olive takes
And bleeds clear oil, and the night,
Its superstitious shadows vanquished by reading-light,

Wakes to a dawn of advancement, in the knowledge-factory
Of Carthage. Where a door opens,
Coin is taken, and a hermaphrodite
Shows him upstairs, to the lewd Mithraic rites
On the mezzanine. Two hired women, seven men,

Kicking each other away, on the filthy sheets,
An octogenarian watching.
Darkness, but for a shaft of dusty light
Above in the roofbeams.
Lux interiora, he has taught himself to call it

All those decades later, when Rome itself is no more
And Carthage a weed-grown think-tank
For the defeated, in the lee of Punic Wars.
Lux interiora, light from within.
Desolate middle age, and the strength to begin -

To stumble down the stony watercourse
To Bizerta, a shadow in black robes
Among the landowners, their aloes, corn and slaves,
Their amulets against the Evil Eye,
Their lares, household gods, instinctual drives,
Their horses cannoning loose, and their crazes to die.

Foreshortened, the years crowd up to him like horizons.
Childhood again is near.
The sea, imagined once in a glass of water,
Again grows small. Concubinage, war
And orphaned knowledge, are no-roads to the interior.

There is snow on the Air Mountains. He is going there
To be cold in the Sahara
So far south, and know an impossible climate -
Hoggar, Atlas, Mountains of the Moon
Hanging outside gravity, before and after time.




Simon Carnell


BLACK PHONE

For Erica Segre and Doris Heyden

Fishhooks of light
      in the fountain with fish;
           a hotel dream

of handcuffs of bone -
      of diving with goggles
           of shaved turtleshell.

Then jolted awake
      as your head, the head
           of a crawling bee

bumps head-on
      with that of a stag-beetle:
           as hilarious as hideous.

But your new coat
      of hives, a hairshirt
           second skin, requires

some serial shots
      of pure adrenalin -
           from the big nurse

with the bedside manner
      of an all-in wrestler.
           It’s Christmas morning

in the Hospital Belen...
      Later you’re a weird
           lone child again -

the one for whom
      coincidences happen -
           though sheer nonsense

for the daylight gods
      the exact timing
           of your full-body alarm

with her fall to the floor
      and flickering wait there.
           Now you’re left talking

one-way long-distance
      into a black phone -
           the connection broken

at a stroke between
      her loved voice
           and haemorrhaged

intricate brain. Still
      all ears for yours,
           with a new vocabulary

of ingenious unseen
      eye-movements
           after tracheotomy.


LOBSTER

"It is greenish or bluish-black when raw"

That piece you wanted to write,
about a bluish-black
- that is, live, lobster -
alluding to both Beckett-Belaqua's,
and the one painted by Albrecht Durer -

it wanted lines as articulated
as the legs and shell
of the pre-boiled thing itself -
no less, no more -
and the requisite amount of armour.

You needed it to scuttle across
the bottom of a page of news,
and into its ruled box.
Where like a lobster in a lobster-pot,
having consumed its bait,

it would trace out its confines
with elegant feelers -
relentlessly shifting
through ninety degrees -
trapped sea-wolf in deep salt water.


CROMER

End of summer Victorian Cromer
with its spray lashed promenade
still goes a little into the sea on stilts,
three winding flights down
from the dank former elegance
of the towering Hotel De Paris.

There's a variety show on the pier,
graced by minor, former, soap stars.
Lives are brought here to breathe,
expand, and be photographed
on the beach. Days to remember,
free of what it means to be home.

One nil down to Germany,
a pub crowd lows with a single voice.
While a mother with a bruised face
teaches her daughter how to throw
chips from the pier, for wind-riding gulls,
which fail to catch them as they fall.




Les Murray


TRAVELLING THE BRITISH ROADS

Climb out of mediaeval one-way
and roundabouts make knotted rope
of the minor British roads
but legal top speed on the rocketing
nickel motorway is a lower limit!
I do it, and lorries howl past me.

Sometimes after brown food
at a pub, I get so slow
that Highland trackways
only have one side
since they are for feet
and hoofs of pack horses
and passing is ceremony.

Nor is it plovers
which cry in the peopled glens
but General Wade’s chainmen
shouting numbers for his road
not in the Gaelic scores
but in decimal English.

Universal roads return as shoal
late in the age of iron rims.
Stones in the top layer to be
no bigger than would fit in your mouth,
smiles John McAdam. If in doubt
test them with your lips!

Highwaymen, used to reining in
thoroughbreds along a quag of track,
suddenly hang, along new carriageways
or clink iron on needy slave-ships,
but waggon horses start surviving
seven years instead of three
at haulage between new smoke towns.

Then railways silence the white road.
A horseman rides alone between villages;
the odd gig, or phaeton;
smoke and music of the bosh
rising out of chestnut shade:
Gypsies, having a heyday.
Post roads, drying out, seem strange
beaches, that intersect each other.

When housemaids uncovered their hair
at windows, and newfangled
steam roller made seersucker sounds
there were swans on the healed canal,
and with the sun came the Queen’s
Horse Artillery in tight skeleton coats
to exercise their dubbined teams
watched by both fashionable sexes
in bloomer-like pedal pants.

I knew to be wary of the best dressed,
decent with the footsore,
but frontier-raffish with all
because the scripts they improvised from
were dry and arch, but quickly earnest.

From that day, and the audible
woodwind cry of peafowl, it was half
a long lifetime till jerked motors
would ripple the highroad
with their soundwaves, like a palate,
and kiss its gravel out
with round rubber lips
growling for the buckets of tar

and another life to the autobahn
nothing joins, where I race the mirror
in a fighter cockpit made posh
under flak of Guy Fawkes Eve
over the cities of fumed brick.




Jamie McKendrick


MEETING OF MINDS

When we meet, I and my neighbour Michael,
we tend to agree
we’d like to strangle someone.

Who that is depends. I for instance
might have in mind a certain person
and he an alternative but we listen
to each other, deferring
to the other's grievance, the facts of each case.

There's no telling how far the blame extends
- we both know full well it does extend
far down the road and back in time and way beyond
the bounds we’ve set - but in fairness
we find it helps to keep the numbers down

and not to overreach ourselves. But then his dog
has had enough of what, in his little world,
he probably thinks of as just standing still
and makes a series of resentful tugs
braced at the leash until, behind his back,

my neighbour rolls his eyes and I agree
with a nod. Must be off,
he sighs and me: Right see you soon then Mick.




Antonella Anedda
translated by Jamie McKendrick

SEPTEMBER 2001. MADDALENA ARCHIPELAGO, ISLAND OF S.STEFANO

This small island riven underwater by U.S. submarines
where my great-grandfather planted citrus fruits and vines,
built cowsheds and brought ten cows from the mainland.
Their trembling hoofs on the boat, the wind on their backs
only struck till then by rain from the north.
They’re still there, horns mingled with the sand,
deep-rooted skeletons, close up to the rocks, no longer afraid,
no longer distinguishing pasture from sea.

QUALM  October 2004


Hugo Williams


PARTY TRICKS

A drop of something cloudy blue
hangs between two grave, attentive breasts,
which sway back and forth
like cobras under a cloth.
Her nipples flicker on and off
in amused disbelief
as I do the Indian rope trick
with my gin and tonic.

The liquid dawdles for a moment in mid-air,
then changes its mind
and comes down gradually
all over her top half.
Her nipples give me ten out of ten
as I write my name and telephone number
on a damp paper napkin
and take up smoking again.

HOLIDAYS

Sitting here idly, overlooking the sea,
watching the fishing boats setting out
for distant fishing grounds.

Seeing only her face, her arms, her neck,
the leisurely flow of her hips
rising and falling on the swell.

MONKEY

I went over my loved one's face
in ink, for something to do.
I wanted to see how she looked
telling me not to.
I traced a well-worn path
back and forth between her eyes
in search of crumbs.
I ran the gauntlet of her tantrums.

I gave her horn-rimmed spectacles,
blacking them in
where her eyes accused me
of following her round the room.
I joined up her eyes and mouth
in a rough-hewn triangle, a monkey face.
Wasn't I her pet?
Her little marmoset?

I went through the paper
and the paper beneath,
crossing out her kindness to the dog.
My pen snagged the corner of her mouth,
spattering ink on my cuff.
Jagged lines shot this way and that,
tearing her skin,
as I scribbled my gaze on her.

Peter Reading.  Four untitled poems.


After three years in orbit,
Genesis slams headlong
into the Utah Desert
(neither parachute functioning),
data capture - a billion,
billion atoms and ions
from our modest sun.

The objectives of Genesis,
to peer at the very beginnings
of our little solar system
six billion years ego [sic].
But scientists have been left
peering into a large hole.

(Not for the first time,
Genesis goes all to shit.)





Sir, Sir, will eu emploie
Cockes, kytes, croes,
Rookes, ravens, divers hoopoes,
Cuckoes, curlues, kakapos,
lch one in his kinde?

                                 #

"Ham, Ham, it's muckle late:

Nothing can ever be done,
Things are intractably thus,
Those having precognition suffer
Heat Death beforehand."

                                 #

                                 Noye, Noye,
I see Mi people in deede and thoughte
Are sette full fowle in synne.
Bestes and fugols with thee thu may take,
He and shee, mate to mate;
Nathless, hit be Mi lykinge
Eall lif for to destroye -
Destroyed eall thes weorold shall be,
E'en eower shippe, gentil Noye,
Eower cargo's rich biodiversitye,
Each cell sincan.

                                 #

"I dree mi Weird,
Wi due regard to eower deityship."





Trebinje; six a.m.;
autumn; bank of the river,
a burgeoning Ficus; pausing
to pick one, I flushed from wet roots
a Little Bittern (tiny,
fast-flying, wing coverts cream
against black - and I'd heard it barking
and barking through the night
every two or three seconds).

Outside the Café Dalmacia,
opposite, there was a young girl
sweeping; I crossed a bridge
and asked for pivo - she brought it,
along with a local newspaper -
that was a good place, good beer...

Thence to (then peaceful) Dubrovnik.





    Who'd've ever thought
that the bozo who came to lunch
        would've stayed?!

[Well, we won't live long, we know that;
    but, while we do, let's love, thus.]




Paul Henry


FRESH FROM THE RIVER

Here’s something cold for you -
the intelligence of water.
(I should like to see you shiver).

Lay down in its riddled path.
It will soon work you out,
intricately at first, then harder,
lifting your back from the bed
so you’re half-fish, half-woman.

Years after you’ve surfaced
shivering, golden, I’ll be here,
student of the river,
the cold pool where you lay.


       BEACH

Which of these pebbles is you?
Of all my childhood’s pebbles
it’s yours I want right now
in my palm - the tide’s bells

rang it ashore, touchstone
of my middle years.
Were we ever this alone,
my stone heart? Come here.

Let’s walk as far as the quay.
And when the tide turns
it’s your turn to find me.


     TRAVELLER

Inside this stone, someone
has laid a track for my life.
It runs from a seaside town
inland, through a deep valley.
On both sides of the cutting
trees keep their feet, find the sky.

I am travelling alone.
I am not to know
how you almost boarded the train
or to hear, this far in
the cries of a gull
tunnelling out to sea.




Jack Beeching  (1922-2001).   Three more late poems.


DIFFERENT RUSSIANS ON THE COTE D'AZUR

The Russian tart glitters in catwalk chic,
A spit of vitriol in a silver flask,
Hair like a spray-gun or a wind-swept ferment,
Swagger her easy-money attribute.
Why need the Russian mob fly in their talent?

Less vulgar those who came by sleeping-car,
Bringing false countess, raffish governess
To aspic yesterday. They dreaded reds,
And lost their sweatshops on the Viborg side.
Their manor houses burned above their heads.

Phlegmatic waiters now for thug and doxy
Pop champagne. Meanwhile these ill-at-ease
Come-latelies grope for cash and naked knees,
Swilling like cart-horse or Slav politician,
Roaring like men whose dreams are a disease.


THE VIGIL

Tug through the long grey hair of the dead old woman.
There is a natural limit to endurance.

Follow the stream. Luckily, there is a limit.

Tug through the fugue of her polluted life.
Comb out the long grey noose of drifted flood.

A river tainted? Luckily there is a limit.

Coil up this hair, and cover her stone face,
An all-night rain, each drop a bitter tear.

Luckily, there is a limit to endurance.


LAST SUMMER'S GIRLS

Puppy, rampageous over empty sands;
Windbreaker, furtive in the tamarisk shrubs;
Up and down coastal roads, a loud Lambretta.

This bay incongruous: tilted fishing boats
No longer photographed. Last season's girls
Wear winter clothes, eyes wet from foam or tears,

And stalk like cats amid the crowd of gulls,
Or finger hair, or push reluctant prams,
Incredulous that they were filled by summer.




Harry Clifton


VICTIM THIRTY-ONE

31 people died in the King's Cross fire in London,
November 1987. One remained unidentified.

As the crowd exploded like billiard balls
Through the ticket turnstiles, and King's Cross
Swallowed its rush-hour, its determinate mass,
I thought of the silent bicycle in our hall
Unclaimed for days, and the frightened girls upstairs
Askance at water dripping from their lightbulb,
Wondering who it was who lived up there

On the roof of the world, a pattern of footsteps
In the small hours, a Tibetan monk gone astray
Or an Irishman in London, without roots.
You could be no-one here, you could pass away
Unheeded, in the general conflagration
Branding you like a shadow to the walls
Of its wind-tunnels, its sub-millenial stations.

There are many hells ... One is to be free,
Unknown, the ashes of identity
Gathered after death and claimed by no-one.
So if I seem, on the public telephone,
A disembodied voice across a city
Shouting into a mouthpiece, calling home,
Remember the hour, the date, the place, the name.

QUALM  April 2005


Stephen Knight


A WRITER'S RETREAT

20 girls, 4 teachers & a Theatre Company
keep me in my room (Room 5) all day
where I am ironing & writing - writing/ironing -
until they seem to be the one activity.

At night, smoke slinking down an unlit passage.
('Whose turn is it to buy a bulb?') I press
my face between the door jamb & the door
to sniff. Smoke. I'm sure. A burning smell.

The Fire Doors banging now, wind helping them along.
Rain sending little insects in. The taste?
Molecules of water in the air. Yes.
Black bin-bags piling up outside the barn.

There's something moving in The Sculpture Studio
- a fusion of movement, colour, and humour?-
Mundos Bizarros, Automata Artists? No.
20 girls, 4 teachers, Tina Turner & Marvin Gaye.

The washing machine downwind of me
works its socks off (ha, ha) spills its guts, refuses
to open wide - it shivers like the central-heating pipes,
chugs like a white jalopy, goes nowhere.

The piano at 11 pm, or tuneless whistling.
A car dead set on Cambridge (9 miles) now & then.
4 buses every day. Impersonating rain, trees
rattle their leaves. - Writing this out
                                        time & again.



SHE SAYS

that I must not forget
I have no heart. . .
As I push the bell
for help, she speaks -
'It's claustrophobic,'
she says, 'THE SMELL
IS MAKING ME SICK.'
(We are caught between two floors.)
Avoiding her face,
trying not to frown,
I stare into space
till the cable creaks
to take us down
- broken, weak
                       yet,
waiting for the doors
to slide apart


we laugh




WHY YOU CANNOT GO DOWNSTAIRS

Because it's early.
Because it's dark.
Because the cat is sleeping on her chair.
Because it's rude
    to wake next door before the sun.
Because it's cold.
Because the wind and rain intrude
     wherever they can, to leave their mark
     here and there.
Because you should still be asleep.
Because men and women work below,
     moving sticks of furniture for fun.
     (Listen. You can hear them creep
     about our rain-soaked rooms then go
     the way they come.)
Because the clocks
     need rest as well.
Because your toys
    are curiously terrible things
    before it's light.
Because of noise -
    talking books, mechanical wings
    flapping like mad in your toybox,
    footsteps, laughter, even breath.
    Yes, even that.
Because it's night.
Because.
Because we're in a state.
Because you'll catch your death
    down there, alone without a light.
Because it's early/
because it's late,
don't leave us yet.





Anne Stevenson


THE GHOST IN THE MOTEL MIRROR

The sumptuous tackiness of the motel
Told me its tale before my plastic key
Triggered the wink that worked its magic spell.
Behold! A stage set for adultery.
I hardly had to look, I knew it well,
The stained, upholstered suite, the huge TV,
The wine, the mattress big enough for three.
Nothing amiss as far as I could tell,
Except a face I wasn't looking for,
Watchful beneath her wrinkles in a gleam
Thrown from the looking glass that faced the door.
Drawn curtains chasing mirrors with a beam?
Or love's impenitent ghost that to ignore
Would mean I knew it was myself I'd seen.




Two sections from A LAMENT FOR THE MAKERS (a work in progress)

II

Try to remember
How the weather of before
Emancipated the leaves.

'0 wild west wind' is layered
Thick with voices.
'How the sick leaves reel down in throngs.'

'In wrothe winde leves
Laucen fro the linde
And lighten on the grounde.'

De ramis cadunt folia
nam viror totus periit,
iam calor liquid omni . . .

The same and more.
Most of what our bones know
Has been said before.

V

By the water's edge
Eurydice is leading Orpheus
Into the pit,

Slipping joyfully through
The cobwebs
In her sparkling dress.

Now they will be together
Forever. Why didn't they
Think of this before?

Blinded by fog,
He forces the baize,
Then the black door.

Out, buzzing like maniacs,
Swarm the flies
From their bed of maggots.





James Sutherland-Smith


A GAME

One Saturday morning there was a single uncovered window.
There was a dog running out front
And there was an enormous tension
As if a string quartet were tuning up
On a diving board high above an empty swimming pool.
For this was the dream you'd had.

The sun had come up raising a whole foot in deliberation.
Closing your eyes you stepped out
Choosing a different foot for each step
As if you were a caterpillar
Always another foot, another for the stair, another for the invisible
Watering can placed in your path,

The basket, the stone, the burdock plant reaching to your shoulder.
You paused knowing where you were
Just inside the gate, fiddle case in hand
While something joyous and panting ran past
On the pavement that unseen loop of asphalt stretching to the lesson,
With tussocks of grass to be stepped over.

He blindfolded you that day so you could feel the intervals
Rather than watch your fingers
His fingers resting on the nape of your neck
Do you remember correctly?
They slid ever so gently over your T-shirt and came to rest
Where your spine joins your buttocks.

From then on you walked to music lessons, fiddle case in hand, eyes wide open.



ORNAMENTATION

We have adorned a white wall with scars,
Yours a child's fiddle,
The varnish chipped, not a secret of the Cremonese,
The strings floppy, the pegs loose.
But there it is, a lesion of sycamore and spruce
Ornamental on a white wall
Above a pot of philodendron out of control.
Seven years you toiled like a lost princess
And swore off all childish games and squabbles.
In your heart there's no silliness
Only the passacaglia of duty correct and formal.
Never call the fiddle an airy instrument
Though you might take its compass
Beyond Biber's high A squeal.
Call a scar an ornament
With its Archimedean scroll
Its proportions from Pythagoras.
You now hate all things mathematical
And dust down your fiddle
The thing itself scratched and tuneless
Containing silence, all childhood's loss.



DUBROVNIK

What intelligence comes from the sea?
The tourists waddle off their cruiser,
Their flip-flops sticking and unsticking
From the soles of their feet.

In the alleys swifts scream, tilt and fade
Above light commerce. Their lines of flight
Are rubbed out against the dusk
As soon as they are made.

A breeze stirs bunting for the Pope,
A tittering white and yellow.
He and his court will come from the sea
In a growl of power boats.

We walk through the hustle of Dubrovnik
To the seaward side of the city
To a café on the cliff where the wine
Is pricey and acidic.

There we gaze down at the shocks
Of waves against endurance
While around us skinny cats filch crabs
From crevices in the rocks.





Brian Waltham (1925-2002). Four unpublished poems.


HAPPENING THROUGH

Kirsten went, we think, because her
Bedroom was colder than Rekjavik.
Nina arrived with a nervous breakdown
And took it away again, slopping it
All down the stairs.
When Marlis had gone we found very
Curious things in her bathroom.
Not-here Gutrune was not here
And maybe is still in Leipzig.

Marie-Jeanne was wonderful.

Anna had a problem about going to bed.
Carla had little bears in her bed,
Lotte had a problem about getting up.
On the second night Ernestine
Installed a boy-friend. We think
It was the wrong boy-friend.
On the fourth night she went.

Elke was wonderful.

Ingrid was a little bit pregnant,
Isobel had her own way of shopping,
Which interested the police,
Jennu, like a plump bird, homed back
Suddenly to carefree Stockholm.
Now there's Maria, of whom our small
Son says: "she's good at snap, but
I don't think she'll last."



HIS

As prelude to the rest,
He may undo buttons, reach
Back for the clip of her bra
And kiss her breast.

At this conquering session
He knows what breasts are for
And moves to full possession,
Never thinking of them on loan
From one as yet unborn who will
Claim them as his own.



WALLPAPER

"One more peep from you lot"
Yelled dad, putting out the light,
"and they'll come out from the wallpaper."

And they did.

Fifteen tigers labelled A to 0,
Nine and a half lions with
Holiday snaps pinned on and a
Small herd of badly smudged rhinos,
All of them boss-eyed and wanting
To get back into the wall.

The kids used potties to
Clean up the nervous droppings,
Tried to keep the noise down,
Offered illegal crisps and smarties
And then began the job of
Shoving them back in.

The lions went in best.

Seven whole ones and three tails.
Some of the tigers would only
Fit in upside down.

Still at large are the surviving
Rhinos and one snake pencilled
With the eight times table.



DREAM 13B

Ah no, not again that wall
With the horsey photos and
Big dolly on the pillow and
The narrow concave bed, sweat
And tit all rolled together
And she wanting it all again
More slowly.

"My son, you prayed for big tits."

"True, Lord, but..."

"Aren't they big enough?"

"Enormous, Lord, but I've been rethinking
This whole question of tits and...."

"Get back on the job my son."

Like painting that matters,
The paint never dries.
The hopeless search for my socks,
Tripping over big dolly on the floor,
The squawking from the bed and the
Waste bin waiting like a mine
At the top of the stair.

QUALM  October 2005


Medbh McGuckian


BUTTERFLY MEMORY OBJECT

The simple outlines of tulips:
What makes these war flowers?
The war recycled like an earthrise
Photographed from the distance
Of a six-day-old moon.

The crags of their petals
Dance out space with the smoothing action
Of the mouth's own slidings
Till their two-sided skin
Bayonets the softer parts of shells.

Still deadly places are folded
Into an unburial ground, where resting
Soldiers tell the munitionettes
They're easy to sleep with,
And for your button a kiss.


DUNCAIRN BALANDA

One should not pay pearl-price
For old velvets, or the chair which assists
The work of the skeleton, the scalloped mirror
Basking in lustre after sunset.

Many doorbells had been out of order
For years, despite the sold-off triangle
Of land the gardens continued to be taxed
By the lucky owners of shoes.

A grey trembling flame left the ceilings
In profound darkness, which gave them
A patriotic look, as if they were peppered
With handwritten letters, or fingers

Seemed to walk across the breast.
Wrinkles in the elbow called memories
Slept in our daytime clothes.
When the two ships were made fast

Together, in a grotesque bouquet,
Having twice changed the name
On her bow and stern, they started up
Car engines to muffle the sounds to come.

A happy music during sad occasions.

When they poured perfume into their eyes,
And also ate snow, she healed their skin
With potato leaves and sugar,
Hugging the fact that this was her house.


LEMON WITH WHITE JUG

The ghost island passes us by,
Its Greek name, meaning watchful,
Like a cloud bent back upon itself
Blown smooth by the wind.

Its village, furrowed with cold,
Lays a bed of colour
In the unaccepted space between
Your upper eyelid and eyebrow-

Doors of lawless scarlet,
A purple that can be tied.
Now a dream begins to value
The fretwork of the small red crowd

To its nth foundation, the cool,
Bleached mood in the languish
Of your neck,the gospel-net
Fletching of your arms.

While love and its technologies
Drinks the working day from your palms.





John Mole


SHIPMAN

Walking towards the camera
is how we'll remember him
and how he was caught off-guard
like anybody's uncle
back from fishing, conning us
with an angler's fiction
that the catch was his,
that it had been a good day
and tomorrow he'd be off again
while the weather held.

Just a tilt of his head to the left
and a hint of whatever it was
that might be closing in,
to be run and run, to become
the clip we'd know him by
but fail to decipher. Unexceptionally
this was any doctor, yours or mine,
although along the pavement
of a mild suburban avenue
the very stones cried out.


THE SKATERS

'This tiny blue planet is home to something special -
ourselves." Jeanette Winterson

The skaters at the Rockefeller Center
As they do each year
Have set iron to ice
In extended family chains
Or intimate links of coupledom,

And the patterns they make
Are the frequencies
Of a New York Christmas
Going out on the air
With this global message,

That love is tenacious,
That every warm breath
Which floats on the ether
Through clouded neon
Comes wreathed in its glow,

That because of their loss
They are ghosts already,
Though a hand in a glove
Or an arm round a waist
Will be what they remember,

And to vanish unloved
From this tiny blue planet,
This world of our making,
Its glory and error,
Is the worst that can happen.

So the skaters crowd in
To the Rockefeller Center,
The dead and the living
With willed affirmation,
A hesitant grace

As the ice-rink shines
In its diamond brightness
Unafraid of the cold night's
Towering shadows
And beyond the endless sky.


THE ASSIGNATION

after Germain Nouveau

Nothing of either of them
is left in this room
no slipped-off summer lace,
no neck-tie, hardly a trace
of their passion, only
here on the curtain, look,
a gold pin caught in its hem
and gleaming like
some poisonous insect's
beauty sleep, the evidence
of his great reputation
and her self-respect,
which with its sudden silence
might have troubled them.


AT THE WINDOW

after Paul Eluard

Grief's night-watchman, forehead
pressed to the glass, I look out on a sky
of double darkness, yours and mine,
our single rooms, the loss of you
and in each hand the lifeline
of a merciless horizon. How can I tell
which one of us will find the other
if we trace it to its source? Already
in the dark together, how can we know
which of the two of us is missing?





Brian Waltham (1925-2002). Three more unpublished poems.


FIGHTER PILOT

The climb on whisky crutches,
The lovely upland where a man
Can be himself again,
The challenge to anyone in this pub.

Before he stumbles,
Try his bow.
Try pulling your seventy pounds
Fast enough, true enough
To stop what was coming.

Then, after Crecy, you might
End up here, scattering deadmen,
Seeing other deadmen in
The bottom of a glass.


COMING SHORTLY

Up here, dicing on the brink
Among her moans and shoves
I say to myself, 'quick, think
Biscuits, lumps of cheese,
Heavy duty gloves, adjustable
Spanners, 5/8th washers,
Think upsurge from the sink...
ERROR. NO UPSURGE.
KILL LAST MESSAGE
Think downsurge, and her mum
And heavy duty washers that
Are never going to come
And this morning's news
Drought in China, trade gap widens...
ERROR. NOT WIDENS,
CLOSES, CLOSES
And experts' views, missiles on cruise,
I.R.A outrage with washers, upper lip
And everything reasonably stiff as I
Balance along her endless sulky fuse.


SIMULTANEOUS EQUATION

He for what he could be
Plus x equals what
She wants him to want.

She, for what he thought
She was plus x could
Simplify both of them.

They try and find x.
Mostly it's zero or
So big it won't fit
On the page.

But sometimes they
Forget the rules
And by accident
It comes out right.





James Sutherland-Smith


A RITE OF SPRING

My mother-in-law foretold a clear, raw night.
Frost would spoil blossom of scrupulous white
Except for reddening where petals joined their stem.
So to pluck them might have pricked a tree, caused harm.

Their scent was delicate, too sweet almost
And there was bitterness, a sorrow that would last.
I touched the trunk of an apricot, its fissures
Were like those of trees grown for lifetimes, not years.

I was dismissed after duty as a porter.
The barbecue became a sacred brazier.
Charcoal and kindling were composed on it.
My mother-in-law brought wood blanched from rot.

My wife, her mother, my daughter were to smoke
The apricot trees. Resigned, stubborn and ironic,
Woman, crone and maiden wrapped in hoods
Were to flap or conjure smoke over flower heads.

As night fell I watched the foolish or the wise
Feed wood on to the lucid heat beneath the trees
And become mysterious, vanishing from sight
As the blade of moon and the stars were blotted out.

At sunrise the garden glinted like scratched tin
Though round the trees were circles of moist green.
In late July branches of the apricots
Split and fell from the weight of perfect fruit.





Simon Carnell


MALASPINA

Given that the damp patch in the plaster
is "ectoplasm" of the Malaspina

walled up alive with one of her favourite hounds,
and that if you put your ear to the pine cone

carved in oak on the four poster
then you’ll hear

the beating of a cuckold’s heart;
and that everything in the empty stone hall

except the Peacock Throne
was firewood for the occupying Germans,

you slip your guide and take a corridor,
and then a winding stair

which takes you into the windswept clear,
on a ledge above Liguria.


MAN AND SHED

'Newton showed in his Principia that if attraction had varied as the inverse cube
instead of as the inverse square of the distance, the heavenly bodies would
revolve, not in ellipses, but in logarithmic spirals, rapidly diffusing themselves
and rushing off into space.' Theodor Andrea Crook

He wants this shack shed or hut this outhouse
of the mind, of wood paint-peeled by salt wind

on a drift-fire shore - a looking to find
a trace of himself back beyond the dry dock

of a wrecked life, a sign on the walked sand -
not this fuck-hut or ‘writer’s retreat’ -

aimless Googling - or tin affair on the allotment
amongst the actual, the radishes,

the car on blocks, the flowering rhubarb.
All wrong. Like the missed appointment

in a motorway cafe: ex-wife and kids waiting
northbound, traffic watched rushing south

like Newton's notional cube-squared planets,
in earshot of the burger bar.


HARE WRITING

The hare, its eye all rods, sees everything
      in black and white. Runs all roads,
sits tight in its form, a narrow scrape,
      until the last minute. Is leaping from one thing
      to another, emblem of dialectic,
steering with its ears. Has numen, slaloms at night
on the A14 in your taxi's headlights.

Tell a captive hare it's to die in the morning,
      find it dead next day from the sheer
superfetating power of suggestion.
      Screams with the voice of a child when caught,
      is otherwise silent. Provided skin for parchment
in the age of illumination, and felt
to dampen piano hammers, in Victorian parlours.

'Electric Seal' to furriers - and Kropotkin
      with a natural anarchist, no friend
of the bourgeois rabbit. Called to witness
      at a witch-trial: houndstooth marks, forensic
      evidence, on the bruised thigh of a woman
hunted in the form of a hare. Is seeking
the gap or smeuse at the far end of the field

that will take it kicking into tomorrow,
      small bucket of blood pumping
through an outsize heart. Watch a hare in flight
      for an idea of the limitations
      of the human frame. Or a tracked hare weaving,
doubling its mazes of scent for the pack,
writing itself - now in, now out - of the picture.

QUALM  April 2006

Peter Reading.  Two untitled poems.


    Hilbre, winter, high tide.
Over the West Hoyle, hurl and white swash, and above,
the sky the colour of Blaenau Ffestiniog slate.
And the long-ruined sandstone lifeboat station brine-lashed,
the slipway thrashing the saline assault into spume.

    Past the pyramidal buoy,
close to the wavetops and hurtling into the wind,
Red-throated Divers and Common Scoters and auks,
and the day was ornithologically unforgettable,
and the friend I was with then is fullfathomfive (as you might say).

    Hilbre under thick snow,
compacted ridges of two weeks' ice on the foreshore,
above the foam at the foot of the lifeboat slipway,
into the face of a Beaufort force seven, a flake-white
Larus hyperboreus (2nd winter);

    and over the flat of the Hoyle,
creaming and distantly sibilant flow-tide breakers
flushed up a fast-wheeling blizzard of silver and white
Calidris alba, and Donahue (thirty years dead)
observed that he wouldn't forget this day till he died.







In the year of 1609,
in a ship of 300 ton
with 160 persons
outward-bound for Virginia,
we was surprised with a most
extreme violent storm,
when our fine vessel, though new,
fell into a great leak
so as all hands and passengers
was forced for three days space
to exert ourselves to save us
from sinking unto the deep.
But notwithstanding incessant
pumping and casting out water
by buckets and all other means,
yet the brine swamped all the goods
within the hold, and all men
was exhausted and spent of strength,
gone to sleep, overcome with labour
and hopeless of any succour,
yielding ourselves to the mercy
of the sea's tempestuous onslaught.

Sir George Somers, at the stern,
observing the plight of the vessel,
desperate of relief,
looking every minute
when that the ship would sink,
he espied land which to his eyes,
and in Captain Newport's opinion,
was judged to be that dreadful
coast of the Bermodes,
which islands was full of all nations
and accounted to be enchanted
and inhabited by witches
and devils, which grew by reason
of monstrous thunder, storm,
and tempest near unto those isles,
also for that the whole
coast is so wondrous dangerous
of rocks that few can approach
but with unspeakable hazard
of surf thrashed high as whale-spouts
and incontrovertible shipwrack.

As severe seas pounded our hull,
Sir Thomas Gates, Captain Newport
and Sir George Somers agreed
of two evils, to choose the least.
So, in desperate resolution,
they directed our vessel towards
those islands, where our ship,
by God's Divine Providence,
ran fast, at the rise of a roller,
between two vasty rocks,
where it lodged, wedged, without splint'ring.
And we hoisted out our boat,
and we landed all of those persons
in good safety, and, come on shore,
we was soon refreshed and cheered.
Though salt water did great spoil
to most of our lading and victuals,
yet some meal was well recovered,
and many particular things
for our common use was preserved;
and the soil and the air seemed sweet.






Simon Carnell


THE NO-STAR

In a northern capital the light is rationed.
The capital is near but recedes.

A traveller waking in a no-star motel
re-boots from not knowing if he's who where

or when. And proceeds, in a white hire-car.
In his jacket pocket a map of its bodywork

detailing three tiny chips in the paint;
a contract giving comprehensive cover,

unravelling in the unread smallprint.
Whiteness is his leitmotif. Snow-light

filtered through a blind; the dirty whiteness
of last night's driven through snow;

a tight ream of paper unwritten on.
An intricately unique star of ice-mote

splintering to dissolve on eye and screen.
The slow sound carried by oaks and elders -

white noise of the green world he's imagined
speaking to him, in season, of life at the rim.

Somewhere at the roadside a spill of oil,
uselessly composing fossil rainbow.



A POSTCARD FROM CHIMALISTAC


Jesuits have left their cliffs of gilded wood; Franciscans stone fronts of rock candy.
                                                 *
Pet ferret with velvet collar in Coyoacan. An iguana on a shoulder in Queretaro.
                                                 *
A man is walking draped in a carcase. Raw midday delivery from a flatbed.
                                                 *
The Colt 45; the Remington; the actual desk at which the death sentence was signed...
                                                 *
...the short and narrow painted coffin of Maximilian, scaled to a botched embalming.
                                                 *
The saddle-topped stools in the saddle-bar are going nowhere at the cocktail hour.
                                                 *
Cornering at altitude in the Sierra Gorda, a recent roadkill of headless wild burro.
                                                 *
Standing room only, for a glimpse of the bloodied Christ with the head of human hair.
                                                 *
Crutched and legless at the toll-booth, his proffered cup receives a splash of pesos.
                                                 *
In its case in Chapultepec the (Madagascan) Emperor scorpion emits a turquoise light.
                                                 *
Two night notes on a steam flute: the camotes vendor on his rounds in Chimalistac.
                                                 *
Cupped to drink the light, two hands out from under a rusted Lecumberri prison door.
                                                 *
Ice-block on the pavement; jacaranda blossom roadside; sunlight on an electric fence.
                                                 *
Yes waking hardly knowing if you're here or there. Before the place clicks into place.
                                                 *
CCTV; barbed wire; armed gatekeeper; Guadalupe in a niche. Someone is at home.
                                                 *
A herbal tea, a cigarette butt: signs of the slept-over burglar in the empty apartment.



PIER ON FIRE

One of those seaside towns in which the out of use pier
seems always to have recently been on fire.

CATSEYES REMOVED on the approach - briefly
more oddly advertised service than road warning.

A clammy barrier of weed at knee depth in the sea,
another a fly-magnet marking high-tide on the sand.

A wind that's whipping blond grains into your eye.
Encampments of wind-breaks and plaid blankets;

hard-boiled eggs and squash in a flask.
Now it's the grey out-of-date photo of the front,

still available as an insert (look to see yourself there)
beneath the cellophane on chemically pink rock.

It's the magnified eye of a goldfish from the fair,
bagged in its tight bubble of clear water.






Medbh McGuckian


HOUSE WITHOUT EYEBROWS

I remember, almost with my entire body,
How you were torn. It was wind-still.
A room of idols. You were light-blue
On the inside, drowning in darkness,
And the sun also spread a despairing
Light for me. Great sheaves of lightning
Stroked your neckless face, your straight
Throat, your small, smooth head,
Your yawning eyes and wide-open hands.

They brought a blue-green aura to your upper body,
Though you were brown-violet on the outside,
With a darkened alertness, without blue,
Not an atom of blue, the blue well taken out,
The blue fog of your dress a muffled creeping
In the breathed yellow of your blouse.

But your arm, made up of all whiteness,
Underfed, warmed the sleeve,
Your hair, unwound, touched the ground
Like a track in snow or a coin's
Embossment. A dance comes to mind
Though the blood-red words of your skin
Stand in the worn grass and have no wings.






Harry Clifton


GRANDFATHER

i.m. William Brandon 1885 -1944

This is the man to whom I owe my life -
And I never met him! Tearing off his clothes,
Quick, quick, on the Ypres salient, there he goes
In terror, from the threat of an almost-wife
Called Chlorine, Phosgene, Hydrocyanide,
Leaping the duckboards, past the slaughtered cows,
His handkerchief soaked in urine pressed to his nose -
Aboard a troopship home. I might have died... .

Then Peace, the killing bottle, and the dropsy
Of the South Seas. Watch as he drowns in air
Like all the other shades, who were never spared
To take a native woman and grow older
In fake Paradise. Hear their shuffling steps
In the sightless realm, a hand on each others' shoulder.


TECHNE

All rose, all became, in their own way,
Masters of the globe.
                               And I watched them,
Human being that I was, outstripping me
By degrees, in field and classroom,
Grasping, so quickly, the calculus of change,
And later on, in great laboratories,
Stationary, all hand and eye
As the catalyst dripped in, and the colour changed
And the white magic of fume cupboards
Zoomed upwards - poof! - like a mushroom cloud.

Already, they had it over me.
Method. Accuracy. The suspension of feeling
For the matter in hand. Laughter was for afterwards,
Wisecracks, and the lines from Oscar Wilde
Who had an answer for everything.
The Eroica symphony - music while you work -
Played through a screen above us, raised the tone.
There were women - colleagues and assistants -
In starched white coats, already deckled
With the yellow of titrations,
Bright asbestos gloves and plastic goggles
Not concealing, for an instant, their femininity -
But that was for afterwards.
                                          Afterwards has arrived -
They have moved, the masters of institutes,
To the promised lands, and the countries of the future.
Cities are for touchdowns,
Conferences. God observes their sabbaths.
One of them dropped me a line the other day.
'I once saw Man as organs, now as enzymes... .'
Not, mind you, that I envied him,
I, with my jar of pens and my Olivetti,
Dealing, like an alchemist,
In concentrates, precipitates, and the retrograde heaven
Of my very own angel, nailed to the wall.






Sonja Besford


POEM ABOUT HIM

yes, this is the poem, i tell him,
which is really about you, about
your not believing that you have a poem
in you in spite of being so pretty, a real
simple man asleep within himself,
so fresh and athletic - always
in need of a female to fuck (or vice versa),
and to impress by soothing away
her lines in an instant or less
as the lights fade and the distances condense
closing protectively like pleasant memories
knitted together by interlocking lies;

"out of this bed do not desire to go,"
i command him, knowing that
this poem is really about me, about
my believing that i no longer have a poem
within myself, so fat i am and in need of his
adoration, so lined that i want him kneeling,
stretching me like pastry over the dining table
in expectation of the poppy seed and raisin filling,
so scared at three in the morning
when a panic attack floods my brain using
the cochlear nerve as a secret entrance,
but this is still a poem about you, i insist,
about your believing in nursing the sunrise (you)
above a fortress with no windows (me) -

you talk too much, he says smiling,
so pretty, so athletic, so in need of a fuck
here and there, there and here

QUALM  October 2006



Robert Crawford


HONEY

after a Gaelic lyric in the Book of the Dean of Lismore

Honey is the call of any bird;
Honey a human voice in the Land of Gold;
Honey a crane’s song, and there is a heard
Honey Bun Da Threoir’s waters hold.

Honey is the calling of the wind;
Honey the cuckoo’s voice above Caise Con;
Honey in uncluttered, random sunlight,
Honey blackbirds’ songs till sunset’s gone.

Honey the eagle’s cry at the Red Falls
Way above the Bay of Morna’s Boy;
Honey the cuckoo’s call beyond the thickets,
Honey is that pause in the crane’s cry.

My father Finn MacCool had in his war-band
Seven squadrons ready to fight any
Man or beast; when we unleashed the deerhounds
They lept ahead, their baying pure wild honey.

Terese Svoboda


BULLET FROM A BULLETIN

In the low grass, the hardly grass,
the crabgrassed bald lawn, snake
ceases itself, becomes the O in reflex,

not the acid reflux, no, the universe
has its day right there, the O for
forever, the O for omphalos, and cheerio.

Taking the sound right out of the air
and placing it on your spine,
you, spiteful and dancing, sidewinding even--

I am sigmoidally yours, can you hear me?
From the hardly grass you crawl out
from beneath the palm, now a stick, a sticker.

In grade school we knew which spigots
turned and why. O painful eternal turning,
the saint’s on the spit, the hiss left on--

park the car on a curve so we can
get away. One way rental, say it
three times. Its accelerator leaves you

behind, in a yellow stripe. You call instead.
What about the circuits in the phone,
the molecules arcing into the head,

or that aching that peasants, bent almost halved,
suggest, curling like they have cast off
a shell and need one? Like hell is a circle.


SCYLLA

Girl, girl, girl—sentries on cliffside
lean out. Rain-wild,
they wave, spare hand on hem,
It’s safe here. Safe.

Men slide the deck, barely glance.
Soon no girls but one waves.
She hoists her skirts.
A trick, screams the captain.

To the men who scavenge,
she worked and went home.
To the girls who wring out their hair,
she widowed Charybdis.

Safe? She knew too much
what was safe and what was not.
No child would pull inside her rival
in any storm, for any port.

ASPARTAME, Ars Poetica

The snaky alphabet in line
still fits in the car tuned
to desire, its big D

flapping--no, railing
in favor of the Hell-
crept-in kind of

whisper, the ruined-
stepdaughter-free-
to-move-out kind.

Fine--the pillow-
plumped word is now
that even a folderol-eating

habit like this
is a wound undressed, a me
left staring because

the damn goatherd
wants the flock bleating
decibels to a Tribuned

or Timesed scree—
you know the goatherd, blind,
loose-fingered, a real talker,

father to the Gameboy’s pell-mell
squat hero already mooned
by a million wrist-flicks. Free

wit! Free wit! a starling
mouths for crumbs.
The furred lonesome self

sniffs in its bunker, marooned
yet pen-fed, hoovering
Aspartame off paper.

Iain Galbraith


My Très Riches Heures and Miniatures

         In the North Wall

Snow drifts all the way, cowering ewes in the lee –
marrum stalk, it’s me! But will you dip, set curve
to lip, and ask no one whose end you serve?

                 ***

         The Fin on the Crest

A land-wind rifles the foaming bank
ripping through breakers that curve to the long bay beyond –
the fetch of a spume-fluke brushes your hand to sink.

                 ***

         Écorché

For miles along the beach the thousand feet, the thousand
faces smudged as heedless they wave back to thousands more.
Flaying the fields bares a broad plain studded with shells –
and these light-headed crows, a-dangle, close enough to touch.

                 ***

         The Sea-Shaped Rain

Draping the serrated horizon, grey flags,
and the pale moon flares above the pill-box to the west –
chained to its stake by the gateway hawthorn
the Alsatian has shut one eye, let the invader pass.

                 ***

         Demolition

These hundred-odd rooks at sunset
motionless on the tillage, while
the jagged teeth of thumb and bucket
memorize the whitewashed wall.

                 ***

         Script for the Margin

The zigzag hand of a sanderling racing the rim –
two pale ounces of headlong rush, wanting a hinder toe.
The teeth and flutes of the snowline
and this whistling gate: all the north-easterly will allow.

                 ***

         Mirror

Broaching a wing-beat heavier than doubt
they err from their fastness in streaming sand;
washed by the land-tide, talking of what
they cross our horizon for the point.

                 ***

         Aftermath

After circling the house for half a year
I still measure time in these gobbets
said he, thinking her clumps of hair.




Jack Beeching  (1922-2001).  Three late poems.

MAGDALEN INTO CAIRN

Stoned her to death? Why not? It was unanimous.
All who stood around raised a hand.

Everyone stoned her to death: democratic,
Quite democratic.

Stoned her? And very popular.
Hundreds of eager faces.

Stones for confetti
As if for a mock wedding,

And one last miracle. Stoning to death
Turns a maiden to a cairn.

THE RICH WHITE WHALE

The harpoon blonde in fishnet tights
Has lit her lamp and cut the pack
And dozened out a zodiac.

Converge the curtains, dim the light.
Her fat, ejaculating whale
Hangs there from a golden nail.

THE ENCOUNTER

The hero lingers in an ambuscade,
Opal in bayleaf, thus invisible,
Flesh of an eyebird, incorruptible.

The dry gaze of a witch, a dragonfly
Smile, like a wall garnished with broken glass
Comes down the stair, her reptile feet on tiptoe.

Spindles that twirl each personal firmament
Come close like loadstones. Give her back her smile.
Say the first word. Accept the mortal risk.

As, in two faces, fantasies like clouds
Enlarge, disperse, on common ground they trade
Her salamander fur, his narwhal horn.

Hugo Williams


EMBANKMENT GARDENS

I'm going out tonight in my black coat,
my front gleaming white.
I’m the last man in the world
to wear top hat and tails
to make his calls.
The ladies shout that I am hot.
I raise my hat to them.

What extraordinary beings
are let out after dark
to thrill and frighten us with their smiles.
I follow one to the kiosk where she works,
a hybrid creature
in gems and artificial fur,
who claws my face for me.

What was that snarl and fluster
up against a wall? What cried and shook
and tore itself apart?
I draw up the sides of my mouth
in the signal for pleasure.
My breath comes in plumes
along the embankment gardens.


THEM

Just as you thought they had disappeared
forever out of your life, setting you free,
there they all were once more,
that just-fucked freshness clinging to their fur,
their tails curled into tight little knots
like dollops of whipped cream.


THE AUDITION

A lot of people have been looking at me recently.
Oh, she's too disgusting. I see you've changed your
hairstyle again. Why don't you kill yourself next time?
I'm cutting down on mirror checks - 100 an hour
is about average - tv screen, microwave, people’s
glasses, a knife while eating, if I can eat anything.
I wanted to cut myself into little pieces, then everything
would be all right and I would pass the audition.

Obviously I’ve been doing it all my life - kitchen knives,
or break a cup and use the side of the handle.
Better still, smash a mirror and use that. I wanted to
push myself down the toilet and flush myself away.
I stuck my hand down my throat and tried to rip my
insides out. I thought if I let out all my breath
the mind would be over there. The band promised to call
by seven o'clock. It's seven o'clock now.

QUALM  April 2007



Jamie McKendrick


TIPTOGRAPHIA
(for Valerio Magrelli)

A monarchic silence as of the grave
reigned in the Peter and Paul Fortress
where Peter had tortured and killed his son Alexis.

The felted floors and felted walls answered nothing
to Kropotkin’s knocking. He exercised his arms
with the wooden stool and walked seven versts each day

up and down the cell. On the small oak table
he wrote The Glacial Period and Orography of Asia
when that vindictive Romanov, Alexander II,

finally conceded him pen and ink -‘just till sunset’,
which occurred at two o’clock in winter.
Summer 1875, after the mass arrests, the silence broke

and a series of taps spelt out KTO VY?
(Who are you?) His friend Surdokov, as it happened,
and a peasant, below, who lost his mind.

The Cyrillic alphabet was broken down
into six rows of five letters, which made
conversation slightly less laborious.

Moved to the House of Detention,
weaker now so he could barely lift the stool,
but one step nearer his glorious escape,

he narrated to the young man in the next cell
the history of the Paris Commune
which took, however, a whole week of tapping.

ARACHNOID

How irresistible all that ill-will is! It lures you
onto its silvery walkways and you find
your nimble feet glued. A fat shape,
unbearably beautiful to its own kind,
a factory of silk and toxins, registers
by touch your entrance and attempt to exit.
The whole device which seemed an airy disc
is now 3D, its flatness trampolines
in vibrant rays and parterres. Voices of fraud
slide along the wires. What looks like a door
opens its mouth to sing, but shuts without
audible utterance. On the fang’s tip,
already withdrawn from your thorax,
a droplet with a green tinge gathers.

Valerio Magrelli


My mind is full of women.
Somewhere
the dome of my skull
must be stove in
for such a stream
of murmuring,
such a fountain of love
to enter.
In this shadow land
I roam like a pilgrim
or a monk.
Round every corner,
every curve,
a silent face looks out,
pale as a gravestone.

(translated by Jamie McKendrick)

Hugo Williams


CHINATOWN

The teenage con-girl in martial arts gear
hooks me like a numbered fish out of the night
and holds me up to the light like a ten pound note.
She lets me go ahead of her up some stairs,
through a door marked "Chinese Stock Exchange".
"You pay me now I come back later," she explains.

I sit down with some other lunatics in front of
a big old tv set with the sound turned down.
Karl Malden's nose pokes suspiciously into our lives
from some long ago "Streets of San Francisco".
"Will she be long?" I ask a man in pyjamas.
"Not long," he replies. "Tonight very busy night."

GHOST TRAIN

We disappeared into tunnels, sucking sweets,
out-staring our tears
in the darkened windows
of third class carriages,
knowing that JADS would be waiting
at the other end of the line
with his clip-board and pen.

Now the long tunnel of night
throws everyone's thoughts and faces
back upon themselves.
How long ago and far away we look,
sitting together there without moving
in the dark train
that is travelling beside our own.

Terese Svoboda


PERFECT WEATHER

All stand lined under
the trees in the deep dark.

Thankless, most of them.
Who told you that?

Most of them, but thanks
hangs overhead anyway,

its shape writhing
over the line,

thankless here
and there in the deep dark,

the fireworks
intricate but over,

just smoke.

TURKEY

Mama, calls out a mouth,
No this, no that,
Mama calls back.

A dog clacks on tile, shut-in.
It sounds like dancing, it sounds
desperate. The ordure from this

suburb is known to be delicate,
a wasp’s worth, not Paul Bunyan’s.
No one today wants feeling

left on a plate, they have disposals
and recyclers. It’s the boy in every man
with an ax but no more trees, a boy who still—

what a surprise!---hungers, calls out.

DISINGENUOUS

Livid, the blue infant you forgot in the sink,
slid of course on his side so much you think
he’s about prove you’re truly jinxed.

Right him amid the mixed drinks
and he writhes, he rails, he pinks
up nicely, a dolphin color, its unlashed blink.

CARTOON STARS

Actually lose your life?
             Stars mill, cartoon stars
on sticks coming off your head,
and the soul, always bacteria-
             shaped, takes off
because of wind which we still think
is trouble instead of
                         hot and cold rubbed together.

But losing it? You put money down,
             you have papers to insure it.
The rats in the drawers suggest at most
                         it's biodegradable,
except for the lead. Yet any Ganges
             will do, the motion
of the cartoon frame flowing with re-definition,
                         with ash sticking to rocks
we never thought of, gone.

Brian Waltham (1925-2002). Three unpublished late poems.


ZERO TOLERANCE

My neighbour is in trouble.
He saw for sure a cloud of
Happiness go past his window
And grabbed a piece, which
Howled and screamed to be
Allowed back into the cloud,
But he clutched it and wanted
It double and then the bomb
Went off and of course among
The rubble they called the police
Who came with howls and screams
But said that all this was the stuff
Of dreams and arrested all of us
Who even indirectly attested or
Avowed that there really had been
A cloud or that for release of it
He had grabbed a piece of it
Or that now dancing among the rubble
He is in trouble.

CHRISTMAS LUNCH

Don’t talk to me, unless on that graph
You are right up there with the truly mad,
About our splendid separate armour.

Tell me instead how fragile is what,
Clumsily and well-meant, was pieced
Together to be you and me.

Tell me, and let me echo it, of an
Emergency leaf-birth, high up,
Protected by tribal love.

Tell me how easily you, like me,
Can be picked open like thistledown
That sought nothing but a home.

Tell, ask, of imprenetrable steel we
Might have wanted. Say your face,
Say what you see of mine.

CENTRIFUGE

Such as cloth hands stuck out from
A pillow, moles under the carpet, the
Very young put their quick secrets
Where we can’t miss them,
Except in the long meanwhile
The kind of hurt they don’t yet
Know where to file.

The very old have stigmata, marks
Frozen in sand, papyrus rolls fat-
Squashed or tapered like roadway cones,
Incunabula rich as the Book of Kells
Or bare and bitter: in any case
Archives past decoding by old minds,
Old fingers, to show what were or
Never were valuable lives.

And midstream are those who, at
The flick of a wand, might fold it
Within something very simple,
But wade, waist-high against water
And more water, reaching down
Below dolls and codes for rock
That will steady a tremulous foot.

QUALM  October 2007



Mick Imlah


ALEX

“Let me guess – light-heavy? The perfect weight,
the Scottish Weight, two hundred pounds,
a hundred in each hand – bam! and bam!
– A bit of both!”
                         My third night in Alex,
Second at “Torbit’s”, the place he ran for men
on a peaceful slip-road just off the waterfront.
Already I am his Scottish Friend, that being
the first thing I would say about myself,
shutting my book . . . . he takes advantage of a lull
to slide his favourite chair up to my table
and starts to kid, that we were what, twin
pharoes of granite! – in the evening tide
of floaters, that his litter of puppies drew
to take their dinners there; that he had friends,
friends everywhere, in Danzig, Aberdeen,
Smyrna or Mitylene, “all homes to me”,
had made his grid of friends by selling raisins;
that this small trade he did, the meals, would lighten
his retirement, “make new friends, and help
to make ends meet, oh sure, a bit of that!
But we must let you order. ... Hakefish? Could
be good. You might prefer the chops? – Nice choice!
Hiranthus! Down! Harai!!
                                          “Two hundred pounds –
What they get now, Robinson, Patterson!
. . . You boxed? – Only at school. – I always say,
boxing was like a school to me, taught me
the ropes, you’d say, the size of the referee.
But listen to what it kept in store for me
in nineteen twenty-five. At Hamburg Halle.
Just then, I’m making a name, you see, I’m out
from the undercard, the girls are all over me.
Now this old licensee, looked like a reptile,
lived at his desk there, or in a wheelchair,
he made the match for me to fight Iceberg. –
Iceberg. – The guy who’d lost to Johnson – blond,
not German, – Fortune was his name, Jewish,
but not a German. And he was practically
world champion, just then. Europe at least,
two feet in the House of Fame.
                                              Day of the show,
this louse, this lizard guy, he hauls me in,
clips off his big cigar, and says straight out,
Torbit, you won’t be going in with the Iceberg –
So I ask, why? – He tells me, the man’s dead, –
stabbed in the ribs, out in the Begelstrasse,
heat of an argument – money, a lady –
some yarn. Would you believe it? Never mind,
he says, we’ve filled his stool for you – sure, a
third of the purse. I ask him, what’s he like?
He shrugs. Does he care? – Says, he’s big, he’s thick,
could be good, could be rubbish. And that’s been
my watchword ever since. This great lump,
I had to hold him up to knock him down,
I never boxed again. You want the lamb?”





Simon Carnell


THE SCREAM

1.
Pride of the hunter in going, he said it, 'insensate'.
He's gutted a freshly killed doe

and found her young wriggling inside.
Exterminates the brutes as you whack a rabbit

annoyingly forcing air through its windpipe
like a pinched, deflating balloon.

Don't call it a scream. The absence
of vocal chords in both rabbit and balloon.

2.
Bodhisattva in the shape of a hare
shook his fur before he leapt into the fire,

sacrificing himself but not
his parasites or passengers.

Remember? You cover our child's eyes
but the shrew squeals in the mouth of the cat.

I lift the spider from the bath,
return it to its serial-killer's hoard of body parts.

3.
As each storm-induced brief interruption
to the current sets the answerphone to default,

I slip out to the call box to call us -
to hear my own voice replaced

by one that's digital and robotic.
To hear, time and again, the 'please call later'

of a party-goer's party-trick,
having swallowed helium from a balloon.


WORLD'S SMALLEST FAIR

There's a smell of fry and ketchup on the green.
Plaques of blue, of violet neon,

late September dusk and small rain.
One mini rink of dodgems, one roundabout

for toddlers, no takers.
Some kind of pygmy pony, hunched tethered

behind a caravan. And on the one stall
(You don't have to knock it off -

only touch a coconut to win)
there's the chance to take home

badly made soft toys that just look wrong.
Or like the animal familiars

crowding to the railings, roadsides, crimescenes,
graves on unconsecrated ground.

THE SPIRAL

From Tatlin’s tilted metal frame - to the coral
     snake’s tail in attack mode and hurricanes.
           The minaret in the desert at Samara,
     the confected twisted columns of Churriguera.
Faint celestial bodies through Hubble,

the pattern of leaf scars round an extinct tree.
     The spiral brush-work of late Hokusai.
           Bookbinding; the brooch of Tara; black holes;
     DNA. Air traffic control -
stacked planes descending in spirals.

The squid-like ammonite a chambered mollusc,
     its polished paperweight spiral on a desk.
           The unsafe iron exterior staircase which leads
     to the former maid’s brick quarters on the roof.
The encyclopaedia article which begins

‘Our solar system lies in one of the spiral arms
     of a disc-shaped galaxy...’ You’re in the spiral,
           it’s not of your making, but down to you:
     part stalled fairground ride - you see the lights
of the city from the summit as your boat-shaped

individual open capsule swings and creaks slightly
     in the wind - part hidden circuitry. The eye exceeds
           nature, Leonardo said so; Goethe that the straight
     line's masculine, the spiral feminine. Flaubert planned
La Spirale, a work about nothing.

Shavings from a carpenter's bench, crystals of sulphur:
     examples of 'beautiful spirality'. The insect
           that's walking in a right-hand spiral, needing
     to keep turning to the left to reach its tomb-like
centre. Like a reading eye, on a page of pure text.

Thomas McCarthy


SIGNS AND PORTENTS

Medieval as it was, I was taking no chances
The day the Prime Minister walked under a ladder.
Up went my umbrella and, sure enough, no farther
Than two metres from a newspaper stand I glanced off

A loose chunk of eighteenth century fire-brick
That came away from the south wall and fell
On the Minister who followed behind. I could tell
From the gasping crowd that stone had done its work.

At the funeral all admitted it was not my fault -
Except Condolences Dineen, who claimed that my umbrella
Was his. We argued this insimulatio for days, the area
Around our shoes growing white with talismans of salt.

THAT NOVEMBER OF VICTORIES
(for Brendan Ryan)

My bare feet are in the sea and a froth
of salt and water washes over me

the way time does in its own ebb and flow.
It is power and its relentless wave motion

that hits the sand. What has gone out
will come back again, sure as the moon.

If I lower myself and become wet all over
I can hear the applause of that November

in the not too long ago. In this Kerry surf
it is the crowd around Dick Spring, kingmaker,

a Labour wave called 1992; a cleansing wash
around my ankles, the sea's wry promises.

ATHENS, 2005
(for Joe Gavin)

Emblems of the Hellenic world of trade, Ionian, Olympic, a Byronic BA,
Cruise past the waiting windows; touch down, gate or disengage.

Each European driven to Ithaca, each creaking console turning to complain
Of its burden of suitcases, each with a Mediterranean assignment;

Each bag falls like an exhausted marathon runner at the gate of Athens:
The flight attendants in smart uniforms tell us to be alert and wait.

This is the Europe our fathers could never have imagined as they fled
Westward, across the ocean, leaving Queenstown and Genova tear-stained.

Behind them as they fled entire civilisations were waking from a sleep,
An exhausted sleep of wars, a long nightmare of occupations. Europe was

Never as alert as this, not in our lifetimes nor in the lives of our fathers,
Alert with untaken journeys of pleasure, as full of its own trade

As the quaysides of Boston or the blue furnaces of Philadephia.
I think of those journeys out of something. A flight out of Europe:

The spars creak and the sea folds and unfolds to remonstrate with time,
To show its wrists to the wind; to show its broken chains to the sky

As now the young Europeans show their passports and IDs with such
Nonchalance, and lack of interest. The whole of Europe's on the move

Again, but this time into itself: the idle moves to the working part,
The cold North seeks the hot islands as if Greece could hold enough light

To satisfy our darkness. I've just said farewell to the companionship
Of the great, to Dora Marryanis in Athen's Town Hall,

To a beloved Spyros Mercouris speaking at the Pnyx, making a promise
To support the work of poets, Spyros who brought Greek sunlight

To the Big Screen, who watched Melina become a singer of genius,
A genius of phrases, beautiful and nonchalant as a Greek cigarette -

So that we wonder what it is we are looking for
And we wonder what the fuss was about, and the budgets that wounded cities,

And wonder too as we sink into the grace and ease of an Hellenic life
Where it was our plane journeys began, what politics and foul weather

Made us board our plane of exile, this sun charter called Capital of Culture,
And I think of the Hellenic canvas of James Barry, and how it all began;

Not to mention, in passing, the Hellenic ideal of Europe in our scholars,
WB Stanford's book, the songs of Father Prout, etc., etc.,

Or whether our plane took flight much later than that; in our father's time:
The Berlin Airlift, the harrowing films of the Holocaust and the vileness

Europe is capable of; or Melina Mercouri's dream, her idealised place
Where a child might grow tall with European-ness, at home and in love

From the Shannon river to the Danube Volga, or Vistula; consoled
By culture for all the horrors of war and exile .... Until quite suddenly

I see, clear as a glass of water from the Nagle Mountains, a ragged
Child, a little gypsy boy or a child coming home from a Talmudic lesson,

I see that child grab his one precious suitcase, a cardboard case marked 'Europe',
And all my hopes go with him, all the cut-stones and the sunken treasure.

Meirion Jordan


GIRL ON A MOTORBIKE IN INDIA
(for Katharine)

Here, straddling the surge of a two-stroke,
your hips hovering over a grubby pillion
at every jolt of the dirt road, where the trees
throw up their trunks to holler back at you
the engine's racket, and every thicket
wants you for a bride -

Here, where your mouth's smudged
to a go-faster stripe and the wind rushes in
on your shouts, you fly your hair
like a flag, and the afternoon's turbocharger
whips you downhill, gathering speed -

Here, shouldering through blurred villages
on the whiff of gasoline, and your voice
urges headlong into the dazzling river -

Here you are weightless, and light's fingers
are too slow in reaching you. Your knuckles

whiten. Your heart flexes its red wings.

PIRATE MUSIC

Jazz up your GTIs with spoilers,
subs and stereos then cane it down the ringroad,
windows open with your mates
bouncing to dancehall, hip hop, what the fuck
will take your fancy on a Friday night.
And make it wild. Get in a few
down at the Wetherspoons, then join the crew
for Aftershocks and Breezers somewhere
with a jukebox just to get the juices
flowing, bring your peeps out on their feet,
then take it down the club, your mates
knocking back Bud and braying ghetto, getting down
to Fiddy Cent and Dizzee, eyeing up
the talent, getting lucky getting
laid and leaving early with some fitty
who will grope them in a taxi,
fuck then fuck off home. Saturday
you don't get up 'til twelve and you
get KFC for breakfast, play some Gamecube,
PS2, visit the missus or your mum,
go down the pool hall then the pub,
watch all the thugs get drunk then tear it up
just like last night but more, more drinks
more drugs more razzle dazzle and more dirty beats.
Sunday. Mind your head and maybe chill
with DVDs or downloads, see the family
and psych yourself for Monday and another week
of temping, selling, fucking, all the shit that
gets you through to the weekend. With luck
you'll do it all for years to come. It's pirate music, yours
because you took it and you'll dance
and drink and screw to it, be cool to it,
but all this time keep moving to it
past the rec, the Tescos, the estate, back down
the ringroad past the crematorium and out.

Harry Clifton


CLOUDBERRY

Mist and blanket bog, where the ice sheets vanished.
But it is here, according to the books,
Cloudberry is to be found –
In a single patch, on the north face of Dart mountain.
I can see you looking at me
As if to say ‘What? In this weather?
Are rosehips, reddening haws and deadly nightshade
Not enough for you? Poisons, panaceas
Bursting from the hedges
Of half the country?’

Call it bakeapple, for all I care,
As the Canadians do. Alp and tundra,
Bog and blasted heath, are its chosen ground.
As for me, I’m through with life reduced
To the great indoors…
                                    I want to go back
Just once, behind all that is Ireland,
To the age of free migrations
Where a man sets out, with only a Word in his head
And the needle of a shattered compass
Guiding him, through what is now no more than landscape,
With its huddle of frightened sheep
In driving westerlies, blown bog-cotton
Trembling like the beards of a million prophets
Leading their chosen peoples out of exile –
To eat of the tasteless fruit
Of universality, rooted
Like myself, in the invisible,
And belonging everywhere.

QUALM  April 2008



Malachi Smyth


HIDE AND SEEK

This love thing's
One big game of hide and seek.
Whose turn now
To crawl beneath the stairs
Or slide behind the coats?
Eyes tight and count to ten
'Ready or not, here I come'.

But whereas once
We hid impatiently
In eager and ill-suppressed
Expectation of discovery,
Now, it seems,
The game's for keeps -
­One hides for good
The other never seeks.

PLAN DE GUERRE (Diary of an Aspiring Author)

Year Zero;
Came to town
A putative superhero
Poet-emperor-would-be-Nero
Come to burn
Down Rome
With blazing enjamb­-
ments and fiery rhymes.
Quoth I:
'Take me to your leader,
I'll soon behead the bleeder,
Bludgeon all derisions
With my armoured stanza divisions.'
Alas
Supplies
Of secret gas
Succumbed to spies
Disguised as fans
And blew all plans
Sky high.

Year One;
Fired words
As from a gun
Scatter-shot
Shot the lot
And my bolt
Just for fun.
Impressed
No one.
Year Two;
Dug deep
And blew
A case
Of high explosive metaphors
In the centre of a crowded room.
BOOM.
But all for whom?
The blast
Passed
Over the heads
Of every guest.

Year Three;
Tried archery
Launched
Flaming arrows
Of verbosity
From hand-whittled bows
At the circled wagons
Of literary London.
Missed.
And no one took
The blindest
Bit of notice.

Year Four;
Locked the door
And me within
Bolted
Barred
And well secured
With stores
And manuals
Downloaded from the net
Detailing construction of
At home
A baby atom
-bomb
And set to work.
(the parts are readily available­ -
no need these days
for awkward reads
like shakespeare, yeats
dostoevsky -
No, any fool could put this
Diabolical device
together
in a trice:
it's one part post-modern tease
to two parts sleaze)
When complete
Just set timer
And retreat
Somewhere remote
Perhaps Belize?
Move fast
Try not to miss the boat
Only a retard
Is hoist
With their own petard.
Success at last:
I knock 'em all out
With the fallout
Which leaves just me
In my jungle -
A giant tree
Falling silently.

In the end was the word ­-
Unheard.

PARIS ADIEU

The dernier cri
for le tout paris
outdoor heaters
at cafes
for smokers
in the rue vieille du temple
here where
waiters hear
just what they please
and contempt flows
like wine
from parisian carafes

Where do poets go
in paris now?
not to the rue vieille du temple
anyhow
not to the bourgeois-boheme marais
quartier juif and quartier gai
(there’s a venn diagram worth a gander)
didn’t camus
used to come here?
or some gitane-toting philosopher
an a-la-carte sartre
in polo-neck and beret
master of all he surveyed.

The intellectual is dead
of a big head
now tourists sit
in his stead
eyeing each the next one over
wondering 'is that a noted author?
or some other?'
don’t they know?-
the intellectual is dead
long live the euro
the eunifier
which achieved
what napoleon never could
and leveller
like robespierre
ne’er dreamt
we’re all shoppers now
pigs at the trough
maxed out
and proud
measured in debt
of which there’s never quite enough

Closing time
on the rue de bretagne
red wicker chairs
and marble topped tables
are all that remain
of parisian dreams
or do I mean fables?
closing time
on the boulevard ancien
des illusions

TIC TOC

My heart's a pendulum
That hangs by arteries
Within its cavernous surrounds.

Place your head upon my chest
And you may hear it tick.

Or could it be
That the proximity
Of your magnetic personality
Might make it stop.

Claire Crowther


GRANDMOTHER

In our old age, the grand other
is still one letter short of me.

His house still gleas with onstrous china,
his irrors reflect eery ouths.

Though hard to say, each word jupy, epty,
I still pronounce accurately the text that hangs

above our bed. Late in the evening
perhaps a new accent will slip

its quaint socking
inside his ercerised vest.

SACRED DRAMA

Femage, homage…

though I stand here, hands cupped to the ceiling, a bunch of dried sage tied in purple string, lit at noon to waft smoke through the hall, I can't worship the new goddess,

Nolava.

Across the floor a hundred goddess banners:

Rhiannon, Isis, Athena, Cybele, Morgan.
Sophia births with upstretched arms between leopards.
The undines hold the space with slapped stone.
A swollen wicker belly bags the dollied corn.
Glittery altars are braided with loose wheat ears.

The old statues, more thighs and stomach than hands and head – my goddess altar is all theirs.

Perhaps it's the presence of three stones from a man's garden and a lefthand fingerless woollen glove I wore when I last held my lover's hand – that deflect a shock of recognition on first hearing Avalon backwards.

Worse - heights frighten the men here
– hey!
Melisso – you are called to climb the scaffolding. Pull
her straight. He refuses to hear.

Such a scared little white wing pinches my ankle
among the feathers, sheaves, pebbles, bowls of water.

Goddess,
                                       welcome
whoever is spelt by, if it works, your name.

THE FICKLE IMMORTALITY OF NAMES

Since he died, I call anyone Joe.
It isn't his name that's dead.

             When a life is sliced in a section, you see the filigree of timings, a school of pause.

By choosing the mad marquee of storm
that suddenly rushes towards a walker,
strangling him in guy ropes,

             Joe may not have erred any more than my refusing local honey (it glows on another table) in the café that's always for sale.

Sun fires the glass to warm
the visiting dead. A soul
for each round of bread!

             Joe, hi, it's me.

Mick Imlah


ELECTRIC BLANKET

(1966)

Oh, that’s not in the script!

It’s true, the whole of our street was rooting for Germany – West
      Germany – even my Dad.

After the semi, Sir Alf had said – guarded, as if he were making
      a layman’s translation
of soldiering terms, and getting everything wrong but the sense –
      that his novel formation,
this 4-3-3, had “smothered the Portuguese play at source,
      like an E-lectric blanket – ”
which anyone knew, meant Stiles kicking the pants off the
      dark-skinned Eusebio.

But then I had visions of Martin Peters, the one who was always
      “ahead of his time”,
pale as a ghost at night, going through the doors and private rooms
      of an old people’s home
and striking softly, before their fingers could close on the “help”
      bulb or the bedside light;

or, I might wake in the wet at the thought of the Glasgow polis entering
      mine, a couple
of Roger Hunts in pursuit of a misprint – the boy in this very bed
      who was heard to be
warming his lions – as if he had three of them cubs stitched to the
      plaque of his Y-Fronts.




Simon Carnell


  SEVERAL OWLS

Not the one low wood note in barn or wood. The barn's gone
to conversion, where silver sportwagons replete with satnav

idle in their newly gravelled drives. Or the owls in their sanctuary,
their chicken-wire aviaries, the particular row we returned to

with its owl on the ground like a kennelled dog - stir-crazed
neurosis or instinct in its head-rolls and strange cries, its three r's

(repetition, repetition, repetition), imitated by our daughter for days.
It was intent on nothing, sounding the air for an answer,

history waiting to happen, a rustle in open field or leaflitter....
But the barn owl that was unwrapped from newspaper, having flown

headlong into the glass. Unmarked in death, with its boxer's
shoulders, packed face feathers, faceted god-like face.

OLD SODS

The old sods, they're looking forward to the time
when they'll be needing to ask their own way home.

To stopping someone with the question:
do you know where Mr So-and-So lives? -

and it's really them - short-term memory
intermittently and all but gone.

A recently appointed postman would do.
Though they don't figure to be receiving much mail

outside of hospital appointments, offers of credit,
other such junk. The kind that's dropping even now,

like the quality of mercy,
into an inch or so of burst-pipe water -

at the stage just before it begins to float and turn,
bleeding its bright yellows, pinks and blues.

GREAT INDOORS

Inside every pencil:
                            the neutron star

that's waiting to get out.
                                  To release it,
just draw a line.

*

Burnt paper in the cold grate

that feathers
                  to tail-feathers of ash.

*

From the fish-
                     glue on an envelope

that's opened
                    in a darkening room

a faint phosphorescence.

THE DEAD LETTER

The study as if someone has just left the room
and failed, for sixty-odd years, to return.
On its desk a last dead letter, faded ink
all but gone. A copy of Empire or Democracy?;

an igneous paperweight suffocating in its dust.
On the floor an antique, outsize Dictaphone;
a smell of desiccated newsprint and books;
two-volume Stalin, in several languages,

and be-suited Chinese visitors, conspicuous.
And the narrow, low, bullet-proof doors
of the blossoming bouganvillea-draped house
seem small as an entrance to a tomb:

rusted home-made and riveted like those
on a prototype tank, time-lock or submarine -
fitted after Siqueiros's (brief crazed and failed)
left-handed foray into homicide. The earth-

floored guardhouse is a converted garden shed
next the chicken coops; its guard's toy-like
Remington with red-painted stock
is kept in the lobby with the photographs:

Trotsky with head in a big bandage,
'moments before death'. Detectives in hats,
grouped around exhibit A, the ice-pick.
Trotsky with nurses and medics, 'moments after'.

Brian Waltham (1925-2002) Four more unpublished late poems.


  TRUDY

To be dead fair, she did all she reasonably could:
Low heels, a shoulder stoop, a slightly bent knee,
Crimping her neck, watching carefully where she stood,
But