The Brushwood Fence

I clean the corner
with its defunct phone socket.
This is where your voice lived
the years we were apart.

I crouch close,
expecting what? — I don’t know —
your counsel, your kindness, your ire.

In one of the last calls
it was your plans
for the brushwood fence,
the one you’d always wanted;
where it would go
and how it might withstand the weather.

On my knees I realise
that this is what I’m listening for,
the wind here through that fence,
off the sea, damped down, faintly trapped.

I walk outside to where it might have stood,
spread my limbs experimentally,
try to tune in
to the sound you wanted it to make,
and start for the first time
in a long time to think ahead.

— Lucy Dougan

art history

the man who taught me how to look at art is dead

he came from a long way away

and did not know how to take up his pants

so at first he strode awkwardly through campus

with grass stains on his cuffs

he upset the gallery staff

because he instructed us

to look close up at paint

be so close you can smell it

and the other things around it

once I unintentionally visited his home

which was inside four lanes

that were again inside

the railway line

it had a remote across-fields feeling

so that I thought of his long-ago stained cuffs

and of linseed and of hemp

I visited him with an artist friend

enroute to somewhere else

who was cold and in need of a shawl or such

I had always trusted

what this man had to say about art

and now I needed to trust

that he would have something

warm for my friend

I don’t know what I thought

as I crossed the lanes

as I crossed the rails

as I trekked the fields

that weren’t really fields

as I crossed the in-between spaces

in the world that sometimes looked

artlessly like art

all I know for sure

is that he taught me to look in a certain way

and that he isn’t coming back

— Lucy Dougan

Dream on the 12th of April

Is it possible to fall in love with someone from a dream?

His name was Eric but I only ever called him darling.

In a chaotic kitchen

my mother asked did I know that I would have to live

with his ugly arse for the foreseeable future

and I said I was fine with that.

He was a small spare redhead with scrappy whiskers

who kissed me over the net of a tennis court

only asking me after if he could.

Volleys of urgent dry awkward kisses.

Just before that I was weaving down the side

of the house in which we all live

whispering darling darling.

Immense comfort!

Love is still right here,

winter-austere as the outlines

of ghost-creeper stuck close,

more than a rumour,

and it always will be.

— Lucy Dougan

Strides

a blind woman alights from the bus

with her cane she taps the footpath homewards

L’Oratorio di Madonna dei Boschi

cypress trees, the spent life

of a solitary oak      shadows

of its remaining branches

across the church façade

     our only resting place

before resuming this traipse

through mud

silence      when it finds us

the dropping of a vase

     to feel its shards

          barefoot we take the first step

by a seat in the open

what’s worn into this soil

     our passing

what we leave behind

     of this sight

what glimpses yield

     what we give back

should our feet tread

actual surfaces

     as if we’re

fragments of our own memories

     as if we’re witnesses who’ve never

been called to testify

— Edward Caruso

Beneath the blue

1

Rows of apartment towers

scents of olives

     my eye drawn to the Ionian Sea

a shade of deep blue melting the sky

     the azure in tides

stretched towards glinting sand

2

Awash in this haze          I’m exiled

from the windowpane my coat hangs off

     surfaces beneath the salt of evening

when breezes carry voices of contemplation

     non-arrival the speech that for days this shore

withdraws      tides lured towards Albanian coasts

3

Pencil-thin streets     broken footpaths

     refuse overturned and left to fester

cars parked within millimetres of each other

a drum beat rattles the windows of my balcony door

buildings close up     extensions of crumbling facades

     cranes overhead

     We live among shadows playing with the sun

          when it’s overhead those we don’t notice

          the immaculately dressed whizzing by on scooter

to exclamations of ‘eow’ and ‘oo’

     sharp cries among constant talk

Roadworks and lifts, hammerings in workshops

sky out of view

     people trudge and trudge

without looking out for traffic

     a ladder raised past the eighth floor of a building

closing in on the heavens

Always the sound of machinery

infiltrating thoughts

     to what ends they intrude

— Edward Caruso

‽

1

graffiti overlaid

with crossings and scrawls

          a guerrilla artist filching

thoughts from the ether

     coming back

blinded

during the inhalation

of a cigarette and discharge

of anxiety      interrobangs

recalled from graveyards

of extinct punctuation marks

street art to be tagged

     overlaid or to fade

2

     verse that lives in the moment

never printed      memorised or passed

on      a blank

of unrecorded impressions

spared from anybody noticing

if it were ever there

     of blunted instruments

unable to mark such strokes

what fragments      could be

     salvaged

Sapphic verses

     forever sing

— Edward Caruso

Beauty is a Thief

I know we’re friends and nothing more

but beauty is a thief.

It steals my thoughts and I explore

a world of make-belief.

Your smile is like the angels pour

sweet wine for my relief

which makes my will, so strong before,

fade like an autumn leaf.

Your eyes are gems of pure adore

where poets come to grief.

To gaze at them forevermore

would still be much too brief.

Your touch — that’s still a distant shore

and ringed by rock and reef —

but hope’s a thing I can’t ignore.

I’ll leave the key in my heart’s door,

for beauty is a thief.

— Maurits Zwankhuisen

Finland

I return with hot sighs

To that frore past.

Greenest Venus-my-trap eyes,

Flaxen braids backcast.

I freeze, I cannot face her;

My movements like a glacier.

The Finn, bright like aurora,

Knows not why I ignore her,

Knows not the price

Of being too nice

To ever break that ice.

— Maurits Zwankhuisen

Ghost-Addled

Of course at first, I was coerced,

And yet I was not daunted,

Though that dark room, all grey and gloom,

A ghostly figure haunted.

And later still, I went at will,

Alone and smugly sceptic,

This time it showed, it flowed and glowed,

So utterly phantasmic!

I ran, I flew, until I knew

The spectre must be distant.

Let out my tears, conceded fears

To which I’d been resistant.

Later that day, I had to say

A word to one I trusted.

Hand on my arm, my nerves to calm,

We quietly discussed it.

Then ‘ere I knew, she ran, she flew

And left me standing lonely.

She deigned to call, her voice all small:

‘I’ll tell you this once only.’

She said to me what she did see

That made her so faint-hearted:

An open jar of lavender,

And told me to discard it.

My fuse was lit: ‘So what of it?

‘It helps to get me sleeping.’

To which she said, ‘Aye but the dead,

‘They haunt ‘em with their creeping

‘Who have it in their keeping.’

And there and then, with quick amen,

I threw that lavender away.

I’d rather lie awake and sigh

Until the first sweet light of day

Than sleep the long sleep of the fey.

— Maurits Zwankhuisen

One Story Only

‘There is one story and one story only’

He looked for a god he could love

with all his heart, his soul, his strength.

Yet all is not perfect, he found.

To know love, for example, is

to take it on the chin. Walking

first, then running, seems logical

but turns out not to be the path.

He longed to be wolf or rabbit,

complete in its feral nature.

Thus a rock on a scalloped shore

may yearn to be a great ashlar

in the Western Wall of God’s house,

untouched by hammer, blade, or axe,

coveted by King Solomon.

Like the angel in the desert,

he yearned to be the hand of El.

The late sunlight falls evenly

on Gautama at Bodh Gaya,

on Jesus in Jerusalem —

celestial Ganges, holy Mount,

the flaming swords at Eden’s Gates.

As for redemption many tales

are told — all true, as love is true.

— Linda Stern

Highgate

We’ve come to see this afterlife

condemned to history and tourism.

Terraced housing for the dead.

Here, one imagines them

socialising underground,

done up in the finery eternity demanded.

And here we are, dressed in shorts

to pick our way among the weeds,

campion and cow parsley.

Surrounded by the summer

blooms of lavender,

what else is there for us to do?

The path’s another grave we follow.

Who escapes their skeleton?

— John Challis

Miner

Turn the wheel and there I am

searching through the back issues

between the stacks for poems

by Kleinzahler or Burnside

as though I’d found, so far below,

a mineral compacted on the shelves.

A secret miner, I could have spent an age

picking through the pages,

the way my father pared the sections

of the Sunday paper back

until only vapours of the news remained.

But my shift was always ending

and the lights in the dimly lit basement

clicked out row by row like nobody was there.

— John Challis

Adam House, Ogleforth

Sitting in a book-lined room,

a gentleman as shrivelled as an apple

unpicked from a wintry branch

is seated upon a sofa, his focus deep

into a book as though it held

a knowledge he’d never yet

in all his years encountered here

inside his room, its many books

or within the garden that he came from —

a book which could, if luck or fate

is on his side, return to him

the youth he lost, locked in the library

searching these pages, to pluck

from one the old love that passed him up

in favour of the knowledge.

— John Challis

Plunge

The same motionworld plunging

into itself and the aftershock

is halos and raysas you can lift the head

of a wooden St Anthony

asking him to find you love

or a lost watch

his head small and firm and finefeatured

but mounted on a peg like a stopper

so that in Colombia or here

something older and less Christian roars through him

fury of human need naked

as babyhood and so the chatter & shifting light

of this room or some other becomes riven

with the sacred

— Fiona Sampson

Still river

we were new

we were right

in the thick

of mystery

and looking at

Milutin

and Miljana

thought some

thing like that

lasting

all their lives

must & should &

would be

all of their life ––

the whole of it ––

we didn’t think

of Chekhov’s lady

with her dog

(her little dog)

or how we too

might plunge

into the cool

green swimhole

— Fiona Sampson

Plated

carp skin

is dillcrackle

bone split lift

rests burnt-eyed

among the salads

pink

stoneflesh

muddy with its millennia

— Fiona Sampson

Your America

from Sh@nty

O my America! my new-found-land…

— John Donne, ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’

Charmed by the bold conceit, I must confess.

Charmed by your timely recitation, too.

Yet the poet’s parts assigned were less

attractive — Land Mass, me; Explorer, you.

Tobacco, beaver pelts, potatoes: these

to simple men — you might propose — are treasures,

men who roam the lands and ride the seas,

but find their peace in home and homely pleasures.

No, had you been Explorer, you would seek

some El Dorado or The Fountain of Youth,

scoffing at those others, dull and meek,

your logbooks full of wonders if not truth.

I’ve had my fill of metaphors. Whatever.

No new-found-land remains new-found forever.

— Lydia Kennaway

In the Chapel of the Agnostics

We step inside only to escape the crowds,

the heat, to rest our feet. My eyes ache

with the sudden dark. A choir rehearses

a Sanctus and so in tacit agreement we sit

and after every breath the singers

take, notes float like a careful breathing

on embers until the stained glass shimmers:

blood rubies, spilled sun, un-

furling ferns, blue too dark

for twilight, too bright for night,

glimpses of charnel-house white. I turn

to you and find your profile

unreadable against this brilliance

and I know that I too have been erased

by this grace; that our faces are not the point of us,

not here and not in any other place.

— Lydia Kennaway

The Sun to The Jungfrau

Girl, I like to feel the heat of me

on you. I like your glacial strip-

tease, the raunchy reveal

of underthings:

an indiscretion of scree,

new streams gushing

down your sides, the ground

at your feet surprised

by the damp of you.

Less is more, babe.

It’s not your shrinking shine

that I adore but what you show —

the gravel, the schist,

the obscene ravine.

That, and knowing

you can’t resist.

— Lydia Kennaway

St. Thomas’ Churchyard, Heptonstall

September: malt-coloured air and the tang of it;

hot beekeeper day of flame-emblazoned honey

juiced in the grave, writhing, sugar-dark

and hollow, your skull,

as abandoned honeycomb

hollow, the sockets of your silenced eyes,

waxing sights of risen smoke

that bands the graves in shimmering heat ––

in feverish heat, sweated to bone, as you

turn in your plot and the bees make moan.

The cropped air, a salted wound,

and the nicked grasses of summer

whose trimmings lie, browning in the heat:

even yours, a sultry grave,

is shaved of the season's deceit.

Yes, I have seen imaginary ash

rising in the breeze beyond the cemetery gate,

across plated stones in the quaked earth:

drifting over your wild burial, your roots

disrupted, still on trial,

ash of the other mother-child beneath a stand of wild sycamore,

restless too, in the night-sifted air,

as your bee-wild fire still oscillates there,

trenched in feverish dream.

And here, in another Cambridge room,

conjoined to the archeological museum

your early grave, a Roman one, where she

still lies, open-skulled, more visible

and less so still

than your own thanatos of buried will

and promise in the bee-stung lane of booby lips

and loose British change, of bobby socks and illiterate

lipsticks, trashed and littering the scratched-out eclipses

of fire-salted fame in an overturning tomb.

Time has scrounged at your gate, left its tang

like a bitch on heat, waiting, lustrous,

to heal the mate. And all this withered sheet,

torn from beneath in a bad conjuring trick

is tumbled from the fetid air, quickened on the cheat.

And I see you there, sticky in it: stuck to the toe-stubbed

summer; tongue-frozen winter,

less than the muscle, true to the bone

an hysterical winter, honey –– go home.

But you turn like a wrapper caught in dead leaves,

fight to stay still in your quarantine of disbelief

and your wind-waxen hair that lies dank in the grave

has outgrown its dye; its roots unsaved, lies without bleach

on honeycombed bone, illicit, un-still, from a skull well-rooted

on its belligerent socket:

whipped spine, honey, licked eyes.

Distraught rot: the ghost flees, done.

And you, in this Mesopotamia of unloved groan,

turn with a hot cheek,

spurn her ash on your tongue.

— MacGillivray

Auction

Somehow it’s always already begun

and the best bit is over. But the auction goes on

drawing on its deep reserves of afternoon

which are no sooner spent than replenished

with warm grey tea and matching sausage rolls

and a canon of clocks keeping time on its toes.

Whether the crowd have insider knowledge

or were born looking furtive and faintly related

will not be revealed to the likes of you,

for only believers may witness the miracle

whereby a gout-stool or a jug of dust becomes

the object of desire, with monetary life.

From missing dates, the figures in these photographs

persist as vague unsmiling prisoners of monochrome

inside the suitcase monogrammed for Captain X

that has preserved a smell of feet and Je Reviens,

a silk map and a compass, in one little room

whose darkness falls forever when you close the lid.

So what am I bid for this teapot-stand, this découpage,

this killing-jar, this other, further room, roof-high

with clammy bodice-rippers and Jack Reachers?

What am I bid for the clart and clut of Borsetshire,

its wax homunculi like cheesy adipose?

For this knock-off Pitt-Rivers of bric-à-brac? Well?

The ether’s abuzz with invisible gestures,

and yet nothing happens. If you should be

so foolish as to raise a hand, that’s when

you realize the auctioneer is blind, although

his much younger wife will give you the evils

and look at her watch. Now you seem to be leaving.

Bereft, because something’s escaped you, you pause

to take the measure of the carpark. At the edge

a screen of willows constantly erupts,

as though to shield a doggers’ dank seraglio

patrolled by eunuchs wearing combat pants,

who queue up for a bun before the off.

— Sean O’Brien

A Dog That Barks on Principle

After Carlos Drummond de Andrade

There is a dog that barks on principle

while someone in an upper room

is losing track, deprived of his name

in the final phase. The dog goes on

at random. Somewhere through an arch

that joins two tenements, a girl is singing

songs her mother taught her, got by heart

in a language she no longer speaks.

I have seen the machine of the world:

it hailed me like a friend I had forgotten

since our day, since fifty years ago.

I must be dead, my friend remarked,

and raised his hat and disappeared.

It was early still: the eyelid of the moon

seemed frozen in the fading blue

above the silver birch whose ivy weaves

its shroud a little thicker every day.

I stood there on the lawn in my pyjamas

as if I was in love with one whose name

I couldn’t now recall, but nonetheless

secure in the mad conscientious

machine of the world as it ground its teeth

in silence, silence, and on principle

the dog repeated the announcement.

— Sean O’Brien

Deep Chill

When we emerged to see the waiting stars, in time

to watch them vanish in the light of day,

we thought that heaven’s writ would run

through all the world that lay before us.

We were wrong. It was a cruel paradise

to which the underworld released us, sunk in cold

as deep as Satan’s cell. It was a city

plagued by those who sold their gift of love

and called their profit wisdom. Damn them all.

— Sean O’Brien