7 minute read
Dolores De Bie
Droplet Reflections Dolores De Bie
Tidy
Advertisement
after Anne Tannam’s ‘Role Models’
Anne, the workmen don’t look happy sweeping up. No one has had lunch, not with the loose gravel’s small hills spilling into the road. One man, older than you’d think, mid-60’s, drives the digger effortlessly, its claw reaching – a dancer’s arc - whilst the cab moves clear of traffic.
The other man follows after, brush in hand. Anne, from the kitchen, you watched your men go each day to work with their hands. I stand, waiting my hands not having lifted more than a box of books. I have swept up, spot-mopped supermarket floors but I write this because I can’t lift
the world and move it like they can.
Mark Ward
Woman Bathing
after Rembrandt’s ‘A Woman Bathing in a Stream’
How he devoured her, that old master… the quiver of uncovered skin, lily-white against the stroke of water upon her thighs. The inviting penumbra of a lifted shift, ripples inching upwards, red with the knowledge of refracted sighs.
A woman stands in sea water, gooseflesh blooms over the mottled iris of her shivering skin. The striations of childbirth cascade, cracked as the umbo of a broken shell. Her swimsuit is too tight.
My heart, overlook these earthbound blemishes and love me, as the water loved her.
Anne Daly
Shipping Forecast
My car is wedged tight on the ringroad – morning gloom lit by red lights that stretch ahead for miles. I think of you across the sea breakfasting alone –
probably porridge – sitting with a book at the kitchen table, pelts of rain slapping the skylight, guttering down pipes into the garden we used to play in.
Maybe you’re already out on the river, oars cutting through the glassy surface – without the life jacket we bought you one Christmas years ago.
Most nights I lie in darkness, listening to freight lorries pounding the wet tarmac of an English city I still can’t call home because how can it be home without you.
It’s been nearly twenty years since I became a visitor to my attic bed, tucked up under a roof that played lullabies of rainfall and rattled in storms.
Across the sea, you hear the same broadcast. Lundy: northerly three, slight, fair and good. Malin: variable six, rough, rain and poor. There may not be rowing in the morning.
Nicola Heaney
Never Forgotten
Early in the pandemic the daughter walked with her small daughters on their daily visits to Granny. They walked slowly. Every school was shut and the unexpectedly hot days were long.
The eldest, always first, would press her right hand against the kitchen window and Granny would place her left hand against it on the inside for what they called a glass kiss. The middle girl would place either hand,
followed by the lifted youngest, who always gave Granny two glass kisses, and her bewilderment at why just this and no more tore at the hearts of the two Mothers. Then they were gone, again,
so few short minutes so swiftly flown, and Granny left with the angry bee trapped inside, and desperate, the living world out of reach beyond the glass, and fated to fade away within.
Anthony Wade
Just Go
There are days when it is best to go on a whim
whether by foot, bike, or car, a leafy lane, a climb up Keeper Hill,
see spikes of purple loosestrife, ferns watching over streams.
To city or town, no map, no plan, encounter a street seller,
feast on stained glass, steeples, lichen headstone stories,
herbaceous borders in a park, coffee on the pavement.
The je ne sais quoi of a journey on a whim.
Marie Studer
London Underground
after ‘Baseball and Classicism’ by Tom Clark
Sometimes I wonder why I spend so much time looking at the tube map in between each journey since I am not going to take a test on it and I already know where I am going.
Sometimes I wonder how many things I would know if my mind wasn’t cluttered with the exact hue of each line where they went and which zone they fall into If I’d be able to think clear enough to solve things like math equations and physics and crises in the Middle East, world peace or the correct date to send flowers to your doorstep.
If I were to take a test, maybe for the first time in my life I’d get straight A’s. My school halls wrapped in ivy. My brow higher than Hampstead Station’s 300 steps but tests were not made for me and the flowers die on your doorstep every time.
Ella Sadie Guthrie
Valentine
She makes love on my bedroom floor, Valentine’s day 2016. I try and swallow my loneliness high on the old mattress –
lying as still as a laid-out corpse, watching the shadows move along the ceiling. Long past midnight, last drinks bell
hollering across the pub, straight cut of light through the venetians – the slick of cars in the rain make choir with
the kisses and groans from down below. The radio in the next room plays soft, mournful music – as I wait for them to finish.
Stephanie Powell
Love you.
it's these hot summer days doubling in dublin sun.
these hot days and hot nights like a cat in the bramble patch screaming.
all down the canal kids are drinking, 20 and 30 year olds sharing cans and winebottles like artists in the 20s, Paris, sprawled all up the Seine.
my girlfriend calls and tells me things have gone bad in the office – she's panicking and could I come get a drink with her. then she tells me if she loses this job she'll have no visa and I'll have to marry her if I want to keep her around.
I say I'll think about it and tell her 10 minutes and I'll meet her. then it's just "love you" and just hanging up.
getting ready to meet her I put on a fresh shirt and look out the window and think about it.
DS Maolalai
Fortress
Volterra. This morning the name arose like a scent. How long it had lain dormant in my mind. Electric earth, I’d called it. Rebound atmospherics. The year a bolt in April rent the welkin in my heart. In those days, I was wrong about so much.
Stopped in a piazza for panini and espresso, you spoke, regressed to ten years old, watching a movie on cable. Noble virgin, probably beautiful, falls in love with the stable-hand, so her mother walls her up alive in the keep at Volterra with a wild boar to mock her rebellion and a black dog to teach her submission. That day as we parked on the spiral path to the old fortress town, you recognised the Porcellino tower. Her face, a perfect life-mask, regained its vigour, descending to rest on your own. Bianca Maria di Malaspina –
She had been immured at Fosdinovo, but in which century it is unclear. Their skeletons, mingled in a charnel pile, were found in nineteen-eighty. Was it the hound or the pig that got to her first?
In those days, you were wrong about so much. ‘Volterra, I am sure of it, my love. This is where I died.’
Patrick Chapman
Modena
After the harshness of cobbles, the dim interior is soothing on the eyes, cool, too, with the intimacy of a cave, walls almost damp to the touch. Such is imagination that old couple strolling stiffly along what shade the garden gave, content as a pair of swans.
I rest between the smell of masonry and wax, and think of living under a sky that rarely changes, where rain comes and is gone, leaving a hint of citrus in the air and morning tells what day will become; where the language of good nature is easy, unhampered by chill or sudden downpour.
Maybe I could learn to walk gracefully in arid air, shirt not clinging to the small of the back. There is a style in having overcome which I know I'll never master, a knack in moving along streets where local flags carry their centuries lightly. Exiting, all is shadow and glare
as it must always be at the centre. This is the true light, the crayon-colour of a four year old, all green, gold, purple; the heart of the sun is in one of those layers buried in a box among the cast-offs of a long growing. Go home and shiver, make your own sun.
Ted McCarthy
Still the Sea
Still.
still sea
still preserving your omniscient touch the coral limbs the lucent timbre and blueness of the altitude more like an ashen cornflower than an Adriatic pool
of six years between a repetition
where every man and woman screamed
I am burning I am burning
and all the rage went dead
