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Chris Considine
Island Wedding
Blue
A ghost, it was said, a man with long fingers
stepped from the bedroom wall in a bluish haze.
And there are many ghosts moving freely here
on this blue day among the wedding guests.
She has seen the sycamore wood with a floor
of pale-blue squills, colour of spring sky.
And the midnight sea flashed sapphire phosphorescence
around them as they swam one long-ago summer.
Today, though, the sea is a tropical turquoise
and the photographs will seem almost too bright
to believe. We are gathered for the ceremony
on top of the island in the vanished chapel,
its walls transparent now, transparent
with a slight blueness like the shallows
where nets of silver flicker
and shrimps glide like solider water.
Green
Sometimes green can shine like gold. More often,
when we approach in an open boat,
it is a type of dark, the sycamore wood
hanging heavily over Landing Beach.
From the sky, the seagull’s perspective,
the island is whale-shaped: blunt, humped,
with a long tail, a green thing swimming
in a sea patterned with winds and currents.
You set off from the east quay or the west.
It takes time to cross the bar, especially
in an adverse wind. On your right, high rocks.
It’s ages before you get your first sighting
then you never take your eyes off it
and the boatman standing in the stern
steers his arc with a half-smile.
You will the pale beach not to disappear
as it could – figment of dream or memory.
The boatman has the power to withhold. He is
interpreter of water and wind. But if you can once
put your foot on it, the island will turn into truth.
Yellow
The dry-grass slope to the cove was shiny
and slippery as straw. When she looked back
the island could have been on fire.
She remembers lying on the yellow sand
under the sun’s smile in a tickle of sandhoppers
watching a plover at the water’s edge
run-along-and-stop. Run-along-and-stop.
The blinding sky above her haunted
with voices calling and singing across and across.
From Christmas the daffodil fields would be a ripple
of creamy white, yellow and spots of orange.
The sisters never managed to pick them all in time
though they loaded the boat by moonlight
and pushed it off into the gilded road.
The last of them was buried in the flower fields.
Today there is a sense of invisible busyness,
waves of warm air, benign ghosts dissolved
in sunshine: monks, smugglers, farmers, coastguards,
children, our past selves; the tall house only pretending
to be empty, its pale gold light
softened by salt and cobwebs on the glass.
Marjorie Kowalski Cole
Non
A spot on the map,
Nondalton, Alaska, intrigues
with its certainty. Whatever else this place is,
Dalton it’s not. Slide this hollow, holy sound
up against a noun: and voilà, appears a thing
you’d never considered. Euclideans and smokers,
meet your counterparts. Propped against violence,
(like two passengers on a Greyhound bus)
the road to despair becomes a sunlit highway
(more brave and beautiful a concept never existed.)
Slice it away to reveal chalant and warm with me
to possibility when, alas, too soon arrives
Shakespeare’s man in tunic, tights and curly shoes
to strum a lute and call us from this nonsense with a hey
nonny nonny there are other subjects for poetry:
God, and his absence. Love, and the longing for.
Note: The place
name of Nondalton actually is a corruption of
Noondalty, from the Tanaina Indina language, and has nothing to do with
the subject of this poem.
Mick Delap
Opening Time
Come Advent, as the hand-made calendar begins to open up
its tissue paper windows,
the garden’s winter sun back lights the scenes my grand
daughter
has drawn: the starry sky,
a leaning tree, an urban fox (or reindeer?). And suddenly
I’m four
again, I have a demobbed father
who stays home, a home like the one in day six, with warm lights,
and smoke rising
from a coal fire we cluster round, together in a way I’ve
just discovered
how to savour,
knowing only that nothing between these people I love has ever been
sweeter - or safer,
in a winter dark that’s massive, lit by stars outside that
taste of the frost
which - by
morning, day seven -
will have silvered the inside of the window panes;
before the coke
boiler
downstairs is raked out,
re-lit; to add its acrid, back-of-the-throat smell to what
mother’s cooking in the
scullery,
or the reek of shoe polish from the earth-floored box room, where dad
makes guttural, groaning glory
with his bagpipes: a strong magic that will prove
powerless - when the next door opens, day eight -
to prevent that certainty of love (which never stayed long
enough
for me to find its name
or draw its picture) from leaving. With the
fox. Or reindeer.
Victoria
Field
The Lost Boys
The theatre’s full of the hard to hear chatter
of lost boys describing
toys no one will buy them for Christmas
Some boys get lost when they are so little
no one’s yet pinned a name on them -
they disappear in the hot flame
of a hospital furnace
along with bandages, diseased kidneys
love-filled blood from their mother
Some have names but never know them
warm, well-fed and teddied
they drift away to wherever it is they want to go -
forget to wake up. Childhood’s a big country -
boys want to map it as soon as they can -
toddling towards the sheen of a deep pool
pointing a cocked gun at their brother in fun
Some boys lose themselves from the inside out -
once strong bones eaten by ice
Boys who think they know where they’re going
on the throb of a motorbike can, in an instant
turn into flowers at the road side –
cauls of cellophane holding the rain.
Mothers dream of fleeing cruel kings, boys held firm
in their arms – while, on stage
the boys lose themselves in flight, up and away
wild as the wind in bare trees and the heavy curtain
falls over and over again.
Mark
Granier
The Box
Sucks, but is beautiful.
I was raised in its milky light, fell
for The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Astroboy, Dr Who.
Thought-proofing for the old winged chariot’s out-of-the-blue-
doom on our doorstep. Nothing
is new after all:
pristine, natural
as any synaptic lightning, the wheel
pinwheeling in our eyes millennia before the dream
of cartwheels, sputtering rotors spun to a gleam.
Feeler to the stars, the bottom-silt
dark where they dwell
down the telescope-well;
our unfledged, twitchy buzz pulsed
far from the watery cloudnest. When you flick
it off, brush from the dark screen those webs of static,
inevitable in the primeval smog is this
square egg, warm still.
Andrew
O’Donnell
Woo Kyung Sends Her Visa
Application to the Fairies
The package on the scales
wears her handshake. The leaves she’s
drawn on it
find a valley that runs out to middle age
across a yellow that fills in the sun.
Inside she’s left a five second recording
of her laugh, from when she was younger
and the clip of herself, posed in a shadowy room
on a hot day, being still, in the viewfinder.
The money she’s scrambled together
sleeps among documents
meant to reassure them she’s prepared
for everything they’ll need her to know:
*The Height of a
Blade of Grass:
*Techniques for
Flying in Strong Winds
She has it all covered. The woman in the post office
smiles at her wild mountain trails,
an address, in bold,
starts where slopes meet sea.
Woo Kyung’s laugh shivers
in A4-dark. Her room waits
for light.
Eric
Ormsby
Time’s Covenant
This
is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant.
T.S.
Eliot, “Little Gidding
1
On Founders’ Day I drove to Covenant
where my great-grandfather pitched his tent
one hundred and nineteen years ago today.
I think I hoped to travel to another time
when there was still a future, when time lay
virginal and open and each chime
of the brass-bound mantel clock above the fire
echoed into a prospect of desire.
I wanted to taste the future when it was still
all future and still ours to spend,
not the tatterdemalion remnants of the end
but the everlasting innocence of will
that places stone upon stone, brick against brick,
that hems the parlor curtains and that trims the wick
--Thermopylaes of the unyielding law
against the relentless Persians of the pass
I drew a line in the dust where I saw
my great-grandfather’s diamond etch the glass
of the bedroom window at the Tabard Inn.
I saw his histrionic and gray-grizzled chin
as he applied himself. If I could taste,
if I could taste the dust
of that entombed time, if I could just
stretch my fingertips one instant back
and track
their welling footprints in the mountain earth.
I cannot let one atom of them go.
I hold them congregated in the breath
I breathe against the windowpane
that looks out southward down the cool plateau
Earth tamps them down in cerements of rain
and I hold nothing but a lock of hair
that glitters as I twist it in the air.
2
In August when the Queen Anne’s lace
bridals the meadows and the spiring vetch
crowds to the edges of the dry pathway,
before the dog days and the Perseids
punctuate the black page of the sky
with flaming commas from some galaxy
beyond our ken, and when the yellow hound
dozes in the cool clay beneath the porch,
at closing summer, when the air is damp
with small accents of fall: the ailanthus
already brandishing October fronds,
the ferns rust-tinctured, on the slope
the single scarlet of a turning tree,
and the cricket hunts more shrilly by the stoop;
in August I envisage what the past
erected to its own confusion,
ours now to elucidate: I follow
the bees, I follow the flies, and the swallow
abandons her daubs of mud beneath the bridge.
3
In Covenant, at the Tabard as I lay,
a century later, on that Founders’ Day,
I witnessed pilgrims one by one file by
and could not wipe the wonder from my eye.
I went into the Tabard’s ballroom where
superannuated hope like a veneer,
crack-glazed and scintillant, drank up dust.
Nothing is sadder than the cast-offs of the just.
The National Park
Service does what it can to nullify the dark
with stainless restorations. It smells of Mr. Clean.
And our past, calcined by acetylene,
rearises in a Disneyfied
simulacrum of a Southern Fried
synoptic gospel of what never was.
Beyond mock lintels a few real flies buzz.
Erik
Vatne
Man Imitating a Cloud
Do you have a safe word? Do you mean
Like marzipan,
tungsten?
That’s a good way
To put it. How do I know if a word-space
Needs six words or six thousand? We were
On our way to Coney Island to look at the
Seahorses. I am a man imitating a cloud.
Look, I was always accident prone. Finally,
A tax-deductible addiction. A secret word
That only the two of us know. So I will know
When to stop. When you’ve had enough. Basta!
I use that in letters to Jennifer. I lifted that
From Joyce’s letters to Nora. I don’t know why
They got so bent out of shape? I knew this guy
Named Gooch. He didn’t know the difference
Between semolina and salmonella. What about
One of them? I haven’t heard Perry Como in years.
We live charmed lives. A little wet nap to take the sticky
Off the lips? There is nothing safe about language.
Sooner or later someone is going to get hurt. Me,
I am a man imitating a cloud. Look how I go whoosh
When I lift up my legs and spread them apart and pull
Away from the landscape. It’s television night tonight.
I am going to make television for everybody.
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