Cover by Lily Kabdebo
CRABWISE Crouched around the rim, in clusters, kids with buckets. Wordless, I watch a tussle of wits. They’ve come equipped, these hunters, brought string and safety pin. A bolt becomes makeshift sinker, and bacon’s saved to bait their bottom dwelling prize. Stalk-eyes see the would-be catch, alert to a murky rip-off. Risk is palpable, approached through stealthy pincer movement. Two schools of landing coexist: some jerk and swing, flailing in search of an instant answer, others draw their lines patiently by inches to the surface. The day’s take plays scrabble, captive in some plastic prison. Canoe Lake strollers pause and peer, in a barnacled mantle make out the moon’s crust. Maybe. Or count lost legs of veterans regrown at moulting season like veins around a tumour. Afternoon, and ice-cream, bring this contest to a close. Tipped out across a concrete page my jottings scuttle to the edge, spill over, and sink without trace.
SEEKING ROOTS After signing, my stroll takes in the tombs: headstones of Victorian gentry lying, untended, along moss-grown paths. Their laments leap at me; testify to an epitaph of inadequacy. By way of stale silence I reach the road, and looking back on subjects loyal, hindsight dissolves in forgotten whispers of smoke: our railways in sweated toil, brogue built by ancestors from another soil.
AFTERTHOUGHT Sunday morning lies abed, Reluctant to awake; Turning over turning The tears we shared last night. That nuclear dawn we fear Each day renews our sorrow. And words, the human curse, Do not bring forth new light. Only hope’s two daughters, Hand in hand together, Our anger and our courage Can put an end to might.
PLATFORM Under security mirror and manifesto of adverts, we who wait, watched over. Beneath the fish-eye stare I pace an edge’s yellow warning, taste dampness in September’s air, and scan the choice of company. Youth adjusts its midriff, selects new tracks to pass midday content in isolation. Down parallels of to-and-from I look to gauge direction; for unloosed words to run true as that line below bridges: each arch seen through a nearer one. The boundaries, brick and wooded, narrow to distant amber: our signal undecided. My train is overdue. A crisp bag crackles, and silent the first leaf falls, no end in view.
GEOMETRY TOO the restless hand which kneads your spine it may be mine would untie knots in the dark curve of a question mark and measure each changing minute our ratio of pleasure subtending fear of dead angles through sheer friendship to leave you asleep a tousled heap caught in God’s net
BREAKDOWN Have you ever strayed over the edge of reason ? Driven by all-embracing logic, become a metaphor in pyjamas ? Driven, for that circle must be squared, or crossed, or arrowed. Every road sign, every street name, every lit window is symbol. While the wide world chain smokes, each number signifies, all actions link. Your silent voice yells in an empty cave. Where doors of perception jam open, no one is neutral: in any car’s colour, the driver’s allegiance. Vision - a contraband daughter bathes perspective in hallucination, sends wisdom a postcard. Ears ring with the fallout in your head. When diurnal rhythm lets go its hold, time melts like a Dali watch across the labyrinth of waking. From one slug, or burn, or coffee cup sleepless to the next; each turning point an act of futile defiance. Have you ever drifted beyond your hidden depth ? Reached deep within to grip some outstretched hand ?
bush warfare sounds hedgetrimmer is machine gun I shoot to kill in out spokes of wire Goldfinch skitterflit and perch a telephone rings growing girl reaches letters drop in pillarbox tiptoes no longer fields left fallow sustain soar of Skylarks housing estate soon tested boy muscles blossom shaking six year-old snow litters pavement step into cloudbreak pupils shrink, lenses darken shadow messages daylight discovers gristley grounded memo feathers dusting lawn street lamp shines sulphur through breeze-blown leaves, flickering night sky embers float dangling catkins drop soggy caterpillars swim on rain wet pavement
ENGAGED TONE Following in the wake of bride and groom we sit: unrelated passengers who watch the dancing guests. Fiddle and guitar, polka, jig – a young Pole shyly smiles, and I am envious of his joy, yet sad at his watershed, his exile. Ours is an embrace on thin ice, and I wonder at your brim of confidence, the undeserved trust. Your head presses tight to my chest, a warm neck resting in the crook of arm: so love is a secret cache, glasses a shield of discretion.
PREGNANT PAUSE The spellbound ear sucks in noise random as nature, or inevitable as moths at a bedside lamp in August: month of dusty pages turned before another year’s fall, another unconclusion reached and left aside. Written in the fissures of change, of anticipation, labour sweats from every barely woken pore, oozes miasmic, and seeping venous to the river, hears daylight yawn at its own sultry waxing.
HOLIDAY HOME
I. Breakfast with Alzheimer Hello. Hello. Swimming the synovia between sleep and perception, a voice articulates: Hello. Hello. I turn deaf ears to awareness. Clamber back into dreamy silt-traps where other endings are allowed. Too late. Beyond my curtain, long awake, gulls with yelping laughter jeer at contemplation. Hello. Hello. Unable to plan his rising, an old man calls from the next room, stiff with confusion. Hello. Hello. It is a creeping death: personality crumbles and faculties fail, week by week by seven-day week. Hello, he says. Hello.
II. Away on a well beaten track Dorset nears with appearance of gorse, splashing the borders yellow. Here is a folded soil. Beneath its lynchets, a chalk spine porous, soaks away our turmoil. From paddled landings and whooping wingbeat we nudge past gift shop fudge and crystal figurines, hot on the trail of clotted cream, jam and scones. Over downs to Melcombe Regis strand where once town band, sardined in bathing machines, honoured royal bellyflop - “God Save The King”!
Below the precinct’s mansard windows baggy skateboarders displace shoppers, with darkness gathering to practice tic-tac manoeuvres. Pigeons, at roost on stucco garlands, rubberneck the umbrageous craft. Grabbing, open armed, a moment’s solitude, I flip through secondhand vinyls. Higgledy-piggledy they recall a gull’s wheel in my mind’s eye, arcing after charity scraps flung from the harbour wall.
III. A moveable feast Over juice and cereals with leaflets, family and friend review the host of possibilities. Sunbeams penetrate our narrow lanes, warm the uncertainties between Palm and Passion. Strewn with gusted sand, the prom in bow-fronted fashion welcomes mismatched pilgrim feet. A Maundy paddle chills as mea culpa, hand on heartbeat, I do trousers-rolled penance. Children, grown beyond my preaching, pursue their own balance on newly purchased skates. Across on the Pleasure Pier fishermen choose their weights, and casting lines, coax Bass to bite. Parents stuck in dodgy deck chairs, under a lonesome diamond kite, watch over summer’s first castle. Encased in gilt, the jubilee clock chimes overdue renewal, mystery beyond measure. With fish & chips we end like a lerret moored at leisure, bobbing, faced both ways at once.
SPARE CHANGE I.
III.
Already browning leaves bask in focussed warmth: the definition of sunlight
Hung up on tenterhooks a wet blanket of doubt dries: the masks of here and there, two-faced, waiting on a word.
held in hard-edged shadows, which slant bars of night across the furrows. I squeeze the most out of time remaining: removal of crumbs from arcane elevations with dampened fingers, thumbs, and expectations. Leaving is the absent word on a torn page: smoke in a blind spot where one can’t be found trusting footsteps do not follow you around. II. Taking a breather: I turn the block to its corner, and back. Retracing routes to a dead reckoning of climb-downs, compromises, and short-lived triumphs. To stay is to swim, to drink the poisoned river. Limbs stretch, pull, kick and glide, emerging silent for a year beyond the point of no return. Catching traffic at a halt, I scuttle by, green lighted. Place a coin at the bedside should the ferryman not hear my rhyme. Always there’s a fare to pay.
Leaf-fall as rain soaks away. The shouted team-talk of six-a-sides – lunch hours played out in swearing, sweating echoes. Parking meters promise “free use of unexpired time”; I plot reappearances to the rhythm of wheel on rail, and doze in grubby compartments. Sunlight and shadowed passages – the clear-cut choice long made, long unrealised. IV. Pressure on a button then, for drawn-out if becomes when in the blink of a moment. Familiar faces, soon no more than unsharp recollection, count these eight years down to days. I am my own dissector, measuring mixed sentiment with a metre length ribbon; And seeking some balanced view, which neither labels nor betrays, is mere shift I’m working through. Sliced strand by strand, the stale knots loosen; expose my parting shots: Home again. Whole again. Home.
HAIR AND NOW Today the hairdresser comes to fix our horrid image, and dining chair is fetched to kitchen. We wait to sit, for nimble fingers execute their task by turns. One hand crimps the tufts, her other juxtaposes comb and blade. Chat circles my head: she pauses only to tilt her own, to gauge the snick, snick, snick of scissors. ON THE SHELF Were some remembrance locked in every cropped filament,
Ranked together alongside,
what triumphs, hurts, sorrows, joys
each with our own lid, we stand
lie tumbled, stranded there on lino?
in China memories.
In those dead fibres, swept up together,
Yours generous as the sweep of its body:
memory enough to stuff a mattress.
water and willow.
But we remain, with restored crowns
Mine contrives its geometry
of gauzy grey and wayward browns.
in the rice-grain pattern. Afterwards the pressure of your shoulder stops my mouth; and into a fold of silence seconds fall, passing with thoughts but a heart’s pound away. Numbering the years - thirteen closes in a just coping Advent. Bound by ropes of laughter, I track the lines, walk the long straight edge of evening: from a tumbling of shadows to the smell of you in moonlight.
GALE WARNING “Dover. Wight. Portland. Plymouth. Southwesterly. Storm force ten.” Season of soggy letters, collapsed fences, and thrashing trees. “Imminent.” Buffeted from a filigree path, I’m woken unawares to roam other neural tracks, startled by lightning synapses in rainy night. From a broken gutter cloudburst spills onto concrete. At the junction of sound and light: the cadence of your name, rising and falling. “Visibility: moderate locally poor.” Jack-knifing across the highway, an artic gouges tyre ruts in the verge of memory. Thunder. Counting seconds to measure the distance we’ve come. Down those roads not taken I lunch with your ghost, the unfledged stirring of wind-blown thought.
DISTURBED Here’s a novelty: with family outdoors, I’ve house to myself. No other agenda than revising lists of things-to-do; surrounded by the incomplete. Slap-bang in mid-potter, a wail from the garden “Come and see” breaks such reverie. Its sun-warm stone lifted, a limbless misnomer neither slow nor worm blinks and writhes, shiny antidote to my paper life. Curious, anxious, I reach out for fragile grace. It slips my rash grasp, sheds tail in self-defence: a lifeline left flexing, reflexing down the path. Part-death by design. Hand-picked at second try, the lizard slides over palm, through fingers; trails ichor from its breaking point. We note the subtle marks of age and gender on smooth skin. Guarding stumpy survival, I place our amputee in a compost refuge, chosen for its slugs. A notched tongue flicks defiance.
SWIMMING MY AGE From shock of deep end dive to a shallow turning is thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen strokes depending on the force of kick applied, and reach of outstretched glide. Boredom kept at arm’s length, I am a metronome counting the span of years. Voices lose their bearing between my muffled ears: all is rippled hubbub. Raising my mouth for air, shoulders shrug at might-have-beens as hands pull back in prayer. Hips, the source of power, plunge me forward groundless through backwash of flashback. Beneath the broken surface, a bygone shadow play looked down on, goggle-eyed, refracts in cobbles of light, splashing bottom and side with fluid parallels. Across my face, bubbles stream the exhaled distance. I whip legs together to trim resistance a trunked back number, skin deep in rhythm of reckoning.
PUTTING THE CLOCK BACK September. Persephone jumps pre-emptive back to the underworld; is buried in the fall that follows concrete and kerosene. Hunched into morning, mist rolls in; hangs like dust down avenues. Beneath old chestnuts, conkers littered as cluster bombs and aid parcels are collected by children. Choice of shape is vital: both food and death are yellow. Night overtakes day. In gutters, leaves swept to mush pile up, refugees along the kerb. Wind-whipped, their colours wear thin and the year is brought to earth. Eleventh hour poppies bloom in lapels, bedeck memorials a harvest fit for junkies. Held in this balance of terror
EROSION Fidgeting beneath dank veils of fog the half-term day trip begins by ferry. Posterity clamours, yet I only half attend; and unsure where to look, ahead or back, dredge memory’s reach for bearing. No guide but our gentle wake of crossing. Bedaubed with gaudy dinosaurs a veteran tube train waits at the pier head: reduced in circumstance, two coaches on single track. Taken for a ramshackle ride, we’re rattled along to the end of the line; to where, as nipper, I grew in sunshine. There, with two good ears between them, my parents shoulder their years with modesty: arthritic lives perched safely clear of landslide. Closer to the rust railed edge, newly exposed roots gape at passing generations. Each set of feet makes its own migration. Candlemas Bells bloom in nodding clumps, their snow-white tears a mark of human hand; likewise the cliff top shelter some hooligan transmutes with fag butts, spray paint and rancid piss. Via headlong hairpins then our path descends to spill us, like outfall, on rippled sands. That wind-pitted face whose crows nest early commands the groynes, steams in risen heat. Kids beyond “KISMET”, a peeling beach hut palace, we near the rearing steps to climb full circle: “Falls can take place”, points out the hoarding, “at any time, and without warning.”
SUNFLOWER Trampling cream waves of cow parsley, a young tournesol reaches tall in thick-stemmed competition with its siblings. Sharing their saffron symmetry, and confident of a break in the clouds. That audience of wheeling heads tracks Helios’ daily ride, slowly bowing as seed ripens, top heavy. Until face down to earth from where they sprang, necks kyphose from weight of swollen discs, distorted. Leaves now hang burnt-out; petals also, the pantaloon’s well-worn ruff, are shrivelling. Unable to look up from prayer, still green napes exposed, wait execution, kneeling. Death reaps a threefold bounty: your headless corpse first fed to livestock, then harvest crushed to spread, slickly on slices. And sown in your grave, the farmer’s fraction, for a place in the sun worth saving.
STILL LIFE Glap, glap, glap, glap: the stroke of water, lately disturbed. Butterflies descend to rest; in dappled shade of apricot wings open and close, silent as turning pages of a poolside book. Après midi. Air static with sweltered drought, and none save tongue-lolling tourists stir, dogged in search of iced anything. Cold-shoulder, the village yawns ferme; its shuttered face admits no light. From bridge there’s a cooler view: in ripple, eddy and brief bubble streams, submerged truth. A sudden gash: violent scales flicker through the green tangle, vanish as the duckweed curtain closes.
Instructions to Arachne Begin with a line. Float it on the breeze of a single breath to another surface: the distance of thought. From the slack middle, drop your second to form a pivotal ‘Y’. Next, a scaffold of spokes anchor each to the frame. Build a platform at the hub. Make it firm: later, as you hang head down waiting latent, your belly will swell with ideas. In the seam of night and day trace a spiral outward. Briefly rest. Then, edge-to-centre back, spin your sticky script. Be nimble across the trap use your third claws. And punctuate weak gaps with extra thread. You may eat your guidelines. Feel tenderly for the struggle: unseen, its vibrations will reach you along silk-strong strands. End them with a bite.
RECOGNITION Observe the pool of self-regard: there you feature, scrambling through barbed wire beyond wishful thinking. There you stalk the hedgerow, in pauses, keeping your shadow hidden from mouths in a glass. Far from out-of-focus faces you might not know again blinking, staring, lost without a label. Sometime elbows rest on knees. Shielded by lee of bluff, you scan horizons where eight eighths sky meets sea. Testing the acuity of binocular vision for windy hours on end. Or looking down in precipitate espionage, on the whirling, diving mass: driven by demands of nest, parents cry their name to close-packed, cliff-bound young. Colonised.
Or neck craned, peering into the canopy for clues to specificity. One glimpse may be all your sight, saving an ear to call or song, or click of beak cleaned against bark. Evidence. On questions of identity, record only what’s seen for sure. It helps to know which trait you seek the jizz of your quarry. This bird’s-eye view, bespectacled, has crow’s-feet at its canthi; in such ruffled diagnostics,
EARTH Sledgehammered, my crowbar tears, levers flints from soil newly wet. I pile their cut faces scores of stone skulls quarried, when grubbing out privet. By tools I’m hedged about: a pickaxe prises, loosens, for spade to cut and clear. Two forks, saw and secateurs complete my corps of weapons. Embedded roots wrenched free, I hear your weakening grip, ready myself a last heave on that stubborn tap, and guess my ego’s backward trip.
Lesson for Darwin’s altar boy Sanctuary among the Lenten Rose in its mauve chalices a host of potent stamens. Genuflect to weed out wild garlic. It gets everywhere, this straggle of bulblets. Make a complete action, don’t cut it short: the smallest left pearl becomes origin. Between joined hands lies its renewal; in the crumble of soil germ enough to start again. Dig deeper down visible to invisible; microbes mutate, surpass our human count. Observe the outcomes, unfold their lineage – rich, inscrutable as the wisdom of birdsong. Water marks the credo of a birch’s weeping habit; shallow roots spread unseen beyond its drip line. From next-door’s bonfire the incense of house clearance: snuff out that flame, in ashes new-create your kind.
CONFERENCE BELIEVES (two days in Cardiff) Leant forward into Spring, bronze Nye argues a point; his downcast index strong, once tenable, now echo of timeworn rhetoric. Between squalls, brittle sun calls daffodils to surface. And policy is aired, blown spinning, dancing like so much precinct litter. Going through the motions: a ritual of shown hands, iron phrasemongery and hopeless resolution. Each voice has its typeface. In the hyphen of twilight, a swim and steam room sweat; certainty dissolves, and lane discipline holds hardening arteries at bay. Solidarity steps out: from corner to corner, an inverse ratio of drink and reason. Anecdotes shape perspective. Public transport man shuns taxis; through arcades weaves his way beyond the surly Taff: from hotel to station, the choiceless pick their brands.
SHIPPING MOVEMENTS (Portsmouth – Isle of Wight)
Embarkation: “Go now while you can” toilet trips, and pointless rummaging for items unlocated, pass the queuing time. Cycles racked and bungee strapped. Roofboxes. Caravans. Waiting on drivers and their rigs, phalanxes of freight. The sweet fume of petrol undercut by salt tang. Clouds and evening close in, and neon rips the broken light. Gulls bicker for scraps on tarmac.
He never went to sea: signed up to navigate the skies instead; was transferred when gliders flew no more, and ended up in Varna, spying on a Black Sea fleet at anchor.
***
Decades on, like some ghost of a frogman, rudiments of Russian picked up then found recalled usage, translating the Hammer and the Sickle, when Obraztsovy was in port.
For twenty years my father came this way watching warships, noting their numbers; through cold war to détente, and back, naming the gunmetal greys: British towns and Greek goddesses.
Daily ferried by three sisters Southsea, Brading, Shanklin - and bearded in naval fashion, he stands: pint in hand at bar, sustaining a sense of other tongues, other islands.
On a ship’s rail leaning, looking back, I fathom their allure; picture his teenage ear lent to a crystal set, construing the enemy: Graf Spee, Bismarck, Scharnhorst, Tirpitz.
*** Cast off and underway: tricolours and Union Jacks, grubby both, flap loosely. Cranes salute, point skyward alongside missile launchers; who, fresh back from the Gulf triumphant but empty-handed, line the wharves. And now gulls crowd the detritus-churning wake: in our turning manoeuvre rich pickings, below the surface.
A KEEPER OF KEYS You said I was getting just like your Dad. By the time he died his pockets bulged, were weighed down with them; you could hear their jangle, all shapes and sizes. No wonder he needed a belt. None - as far as you knew - fitted anywhere. But, I countered, they could have. In the teeth of every blade an answer to the unsolved puzzle of a lock. Each might reveal some secret, if we only guessed where its keyway was. Try one, have a go. Between thumb and crooked finger take the bow, apply some torque and turn its shaft. Listen for pins tumbling to their shear line, and imagine. The view from a sash window, a tune from a musical box, the petty rattle of a cash tin. A sewing-machine’s whirr, escape on an unchained bike, a sandwich in a briefcase. The whiff of grass cuttings in a shed, the privacy of a drawer, keepsakes in a treasure chest. I’d carry on about the openings, the untold stories behind front doors, but you’re not persuaded, I can tell. Simply scrap metal, you argue, not even worth recycling. Whatever. This collection stays you never know when one may fit. Along with the redundant foreign coins I’ll leave you them in my will, an array of question marks.
HANDED DOWN
It is Easter Sunday evening. We pore over our given hands, shake off the torpor of a feast. Mock reluctant grandparents, razor-sharp in armchairs, have been drawn in. Back to the fireplace, on a stool I’m folded, ready to wrestle their wrinkled fingers: solo whist, the clash of one against three. With a one-time bank clerk’s deft flick my father riffles the pack, cuts, shuffles, and deals four provinces their chance. I decipher the semaphore of reordered dispositions; hidden faces are fanned as a shield. Preferring no-trump mayhem to the canon of hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades, Dad’s favourite bid, misere, defies us all to make him win. As patterns emerge, others warm to the prospect of abundance. His own father is a slab of a man. White hair trimmed weekly, serious about gaining a majority and taciturn as a croppy boy. Has De Valera next to God, says only “talk never played a hand”. “There’s a nice little card for you” replies my mother’s mother, easy with the humour of dual loyalties: brothers in Cork shipyards, husband at Jutland, translating wireless signals. Another volunteer. Hush. Turned cards are on the table, played like scenes from Irish history: the rising and the risen.
Mrs. Zhivago irons (a home movie) Zhivago watches his pregnant wife, hears her purpose in the rhythmic thud of flat triangle stroked over cloth. She takes its point into the tuck of cuffs, follows the edge of pleats, with heat and weight loosening the long chain bonds. I look on, share her fixed impatience with the slightest crinkle, straightening in my head the crooked fibres. Collars are flattened wrong side first; even in the yoke of his shoulders creases are pressed knife-sharp, no puckering. Here, we bring you this pile of lines, smoothed and fastidiously folded. Finish the job: put them where they belong.
TURN Barely into our stride, the year and I become acquainted, shake off the newness.
Beneath our canopy heedless long-tails twitter, weave the beeches black-and-white with gossip.
Shed leaves are frosted as sugar ice on stale mince pies, and crackle under foot .
Light hungry, I look back and find you there, picking your own path to brief convergence.
Through callow saplings and fallen branches, the crashing echoes without reply.
Precarious above, the aerial deadwood waits on January’s first strong blast.
PIER RELATIONSHIP (for Gerard Cassidy) Under a corrugate roof open to the wind, rising brusque from waves below, I wait in dying light as you so often did for carriages to move me on. Out of that photo long gone your greying beard, in straight-faced converse with an elderly guard, nods recognition. Memory’s pull is strong, here at the head of the line. Thick with paint this iron spine resists its rusting. Nightfall: a cloud of wagtails flitter like distressed moths, seek roost among the stanchions, from settlement draw common strength. Along the pier’s full length I’ll follow the lamp lit tide, rippling, broadening to the margin. In sea-black mirror no view to bring back home and dispute, with you, its proof.
From Birmingham via the Isle of Wight, MARK CASSIDY teaches Radiography in Portsmouth, where he lives with two rabbits, seven trees and the rest of his family. His poems have seen the light of day in Poetry Salzburg Review, Northwards Now and This Island City: Portsmouth in Poetry. Others may be found on his blog, Fractures.