Poems

FLOOD AT BOSCASTLE

Ten steps down, through Sargasso weeds
green as the felt walls
of a fish tank, is a door
through which only haruspices may pass, bearded
and with credit cards,
to buy sacred books
and strange instruments for scrying
so they might peer inside
the living heart
and say which house survives,
which doesn’t.

Portal invulnerable, they cry,
to the left-hand of the rising river,
thy charmed walls shall not be blowholes
for the unclenched well of the waters,
no spiraculum mirabile
breathing mud into the underworld.

Later, stripped to the waist, men dig
blackened books
from the whale ribs of a cottage,
then stamp up through mud
to the Cobweb
for a finger or two of whisky,
predicting more rain
on the print of a wetted thumb.


This poem first appeared in Poetry Review, and is now available in Camper Van Blues (Salt)


 
ALMOST ICELAND

The house was a standing stone
on the edge of annihilation.

It sat there uncomplaining
while acres of wind

pummelled and rattled windows
and floorboards.

The sea birds shunned it. The bees
rarely came so far north.

The sheep called out to it to move
but it didn't.

It just sat there.

Its single chimney grinned up at the sky
like a maniac.

For miles around, whole islands lay down
and withered. Stones

stunted themselves in its shadow.
And always the wind

hammering for the house
to be absent.

Finally, its inhabitants packed up
and left.

The house remained,
folding its arms and gritting black teeth.

It had no intention of surrender.

The wind blew on
battering its ram's head repeatedly

against lintels and uprights

its high battle-cry
prising tiles from the roof

imploding
the senseless resistance of doorways.

  
First published in Acumen, then collected in Boudicca & Co


IT WAS COOL INSIDE THE CHAPEL

It was cool inside the chapel.
Blue torpor had hung over us
for months, cyanising
the pale edge of morning.
Here, even the kids marvelled
at Matisse, adored him.

If you thought anything
of that astonishing patina
cast over white walls
by stained glass in sunlight,
you never communicated it;
turned away, smoking
your ubiquitous cigarette.

Later, we sat contemplating
the blue mosaic of fish
in one of Braque's ceramics.
Nothing had happened.
One person had simply severed
from the other, side by side
in the brilliant aftermath.

First published in Under The Hill (IOM Poetry Magazine, edited by Roly Drower), then collected in Boudicca & Co (Salt).



EVENING'S SHUTTLE
(about the River Sherbourne, Coventry)

Brackish in the mouth,
the river flattens here to a modest clinker,

black aftermath of rain
over tarmac

and the city rising above it, vast
stone-shod angler

damming the detritus of waters
to an uncertain trickle,

moon-flow of the menopausal,
screech of an owl

in the nightlight glow
of ever-dusk darkness

over industry and high-rise,
tenement and bypass.

Cars glisten on its new river,
borne sheer

on the traffic tide, silver on silver,
flowing up or under

these cumbersome stone arches
of bridge and fly-over

weaving in and out of the city
like evening’s shuttle –

now silent, now whistling,
now swollen, now empty.


 
Commissioned 2006 by Heaventree Press for SHERB, an anthology of poems about the urban-rural Sherbourne River. Later collected in Camper Van Blues (Salt).
 
*

A selection from the Boudicca sequence. The following poems appeared in Jane Holland's second collection, Boudicca and Co (Salt Publishing 2006).



RED STAR

They say when I was born
a red star flamed in the east
but it was either torchlight
or the glint of my mother's hair.

They say my first breath
brought the wild geese back
but it was late spring
and the waters were warmer.

They say the great oak split
at the hour of my birth
but it was only lightning
trying to reach earth there.

I saw none of these things
but I've heard them all.
I believe the world trembled
when I started to crawl.


THE WHOLE OF BRITAIN

Out of Verulamium, we came
to the height of a hill.

I stood and looked down, light
like a weight on my shoulders

and the whole of Britain
glinting before us

like a coin tossed in the sun,
blunt-edged, foreign.


WAR PAINT

Some of the men went naked into battle
except for their war paint -

it was like watching gods fight,
blue-thighed, hanging like horses,

like a dog after a bitch,
with their own blood in their eyes,

sweat on their hands,
mud past their ankles, their knees,

flies on their shoulders
and the crow in full sun afterwards

unspooling their innards.



PURIFICATION

It had been raining for weeks -
or that's how it felt to us,

rain like a sluice through the trees
bright-gold under it - the sun

hefting up afterwards
as it used to do in my childhood

prickly and golden
over the drowned black drub

of a thicket, a spinney
where we stood by steaming horses

and make-shift tents, impatient
for the rain to finish

rinsing the blood off, to purge us
for death and be done with it.


*

The following poems first appeared in The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman
(Bloodaxe, 1997), out of print but now available in ebook as Disreputable.


SLEEP

The green arch of the bridge says sleep
The low slope of the field says sleep
The vole, lowering its head in the hedgerow, says sleep

The evening smoke says sleep
The white wall and the white fence say sleep
The canal, turning and wending, says sleep

The grim army of pylons says sleep
The dream of the cows, dreaming, says sleep
The leaf, midway between green and gold, says sleep

The flat shock of the horizon says sleep
The red tiles of the station say sleep
The fierce heart, unbending, says sleep

and sleep again.

But the coiled snake of the soul, hissing,
retreating, slipping its leash
and beating its tail at the door of the heart
says 'wake, wake!' and 'the fall is forever'.



SPIN-CYCLE
(for Becky)

You've been blackberrying again.
I take your blouse
and watch it turn

through the white suds
in the drum, rinse-hold,
spinning slowly through the cycle.

I hear you up above,
bouncing on the bed
to reach the oval mirror,

see the purple stains
around your mouth and chin,
blackness under nails

and in your hair.
Soon, like your swan-necked sister,
you will not have to stretch

on tiptoe for the sink
or grip the rail
when coming down the stairs.

You say 'When?'
I do not have the answers.
Just the slow loop

of your blouse
growing heavy with water,
as one cycle ends
and waits upon another.



FORGETTING TO REMEMBER
(for my artist grandmother, Christiana Evelyn Beatrice Holland, 1903 - 1997)

You turned your face to the wall a year ago,
waiting for this. Not a word, not a whisper
passed your lips. In your eyes, not a flicker
when they came and went, those ghosts
dressed like your children, but unknown, older.
And your son was not your husband, though
you must have thought so, trying his name.

The nurse came by, with something
to help you sleep, but you didn't. Sat there
as though for a portrait, erasing the canvas
with cataracts, your glasses deep bottle-green.
A few years shy of the century, you were still
in that sunny front room at Maison Dieu,
preparing to paint, though they'd sold it
to pay the home fees ten years before.

I was almost as tall as you at eleven,
sunlight glinting off that shade you wore,
one eye patched like a pirate's.
And after the guns at Arromanches,
he could never hear the racing results
so you had to repeat, repeat yourself
until he too was gone; memory
evaporating too swiftly then,
like turps you'd left in the sun.