Valedictory poems

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Feb 142010

Halving



There is a place I could feel at home
beneath a catastrophe of wires
in this white evening under plastic stars
I could feel all the warmth of the room
endlessly in glass in all its orchestrations and might
leaning through wet eyelids
with the valley held in frame despite
or beyond the singing shade where kids
parade in toiling sheets laughing there,
under the hills, under last year’s windows and black bricks,
the black earth with its island kisses there —
and in that place of tobacco and sticks
and seed-strewn avenues, poured at dusk,
filled with hosepipes, rag and bone men and musk —
coal-defined, small, so small, where the roads
turn before a regimented horizon
to take away the girl, to take away the codes
love ladles in, as the lovers run
taking the sales reps and their families
into the future deserts filled with flies,
into the son’s sour contralto cries,
beside the boiling copper lies;
there is a place I could feel at home,
with street names and clangour and dogs
locked in warm sheds beside a green lawn
and all the dread and all the wishes, knocks
and skirmishes, and wise hugs,
would leave us semi-carnal on the rocks
of a magisterial sea, the radio features there,
from a red summer and in that fine archipelago
of thin shouts one sleep would do me there,
one tiny sleep would really do for me and you.

Poem for my father

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Feb 142010

The Weapon

for Isobel Dixon

Waving hello through the Fiat’s fumes, we were waving goodbye,
a film in amber fields of Cornish shade and wheat,
yellow jerseys and a crop duster — that Corsair —
hurling its shoulders over seven-year-old dream-white air.

You had yellow fever in some antic grey chassis, too, mid-
Pacific, gauntleted, hung at my mother’s lips, that hand-painted
lilac studio shot laying near your sack of home, now twenty years apart.
In the end you waved from the car to me, crying some way in to life,

and at your breakable neighbourhood return: ripped up, corseted,
the surgery over, the coming months became love’s parasite
and you became my upholstery of broken evenings, knowing summer static.
But I broke free with all my feelings ending empty in a weapon.

HMS Devonshire, there I see you scrapped in shaking loyal air,
you are breathing in a new Korean din, and I’m inside a future destitution:
breathing still foreshortens time. I’m almost your age now.
A mouthful lies between us then in some disgust of stories and a past,

I am dwarfed beside you in that summer field, a child in mewling montage.
How can we love what’s not bestowed, in the happiest
prize blood brings? My life has always been this weaker separation since.
Plied in that robbery of nows, as you piled in your pillows, too.

Seated, hands planted firmly, so

Work in progress No Responses »
Feb 122010

The Writer


He sits in the fraying shirt with epaulettes,
hands placed squarely on the knees, so, loyal perhaps,
back taut. He sits in the beach-dreck chair
facing the south window, the long, taupe, negligible
oblong, where we hear (should we lean)
such tremendous sounds as the landscape affords.
He imagines tart packages of darkness in rotation,
winds over plantains, young birds, rasping yards
and, wrapped under the torrid roots, the thin worms
glistening in their white sinecures, eating the past.
We cherish his hard back. We stand behind him and work
around the den to see his grey ears, thick sideburns,
then notice the sudden fuchsia ridge, the blackened
accoutrements of the smashed face. He’s all caved in.
Days pass. Years. We wander. How could we not wander
about his intense, heavy frame. We watch the faceless one
watching, a damaged cuckold watching the shade
over the skins of the timbers, the skins of the walls
settling in the lank tableau. We are moving like hair
in the powdered light over the atrocious basin
of the head, until we notice the mirror sharply recovering
the battery and disgrace and find we are seated alone,
loving again in the wild escutcheons of the days.

© 2011 Chris Emery — poet and publisher Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha