Category: Poetry

Now they are no longer
any trouble to each other

he can turn things over, get down to that list
of things that never happened, all of the lost

unfinishable business.
For instance… for instance,

how he never clipped and kept her hair, or drew a hairbrush
through that style of hers, and never knew how not to blush

at the fall of her name in close company.
How they never walked out into hard rain under sheet lightning,

or did the gears while the other was driving.
How he never raised his fingertips

to stop the segments of her lips
from breaking the news,

or picked for himself the pear of her heart,
or lifted her hand to where his own heart

was a small, dark, terrified bird
in her grip. Where it hurt.

Or said, ‘I do’,
and put it in writing.

And never fled the black mile back to his house
or worked a comb where no comb had been, or walked back home

through a black mile hugging a punctured heart,
where it hurt, where it hurt, or helped her hand

to his butterfly heart
in its two blue halves.

And never almost cried,
and never once described

an attack of the heart,
or under a silk shirt

nursed in his hand her breast,
her left, like a tear of flesh

wept by the heart,
where it hurts.

Or christened the Pole Star in her name,
or said “Don’t ask me how it is

I love you.
I just do.”

How he never figured out a fireproof plan,
or unravelled her hand, as if her hand

were a solid ball
of silver foil

and discovered a lifeline hiding inside it,
and measured the trace of his own alongside it.

But said some things and didn’t mean them –
easy targets anybody could have mentioned.

And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,
about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often.

(after Simon Armitage)

You said I let you get away
with things
and that’s what can turn kindness bad.
I would apologise,
but love is the soft parts of us.
*
There is a Japanese word to describe
the sense a person has upon meeting
another person that future love between them is inevitable.
This is not the same as love at first sight.
For example,
your smell was never unfamiliar.
*
You noticed
my veins
which are blue and desperate
to find each other.
There is a German word
to describe the blue of veins,
which is also grey metal and green
and the colour of haunted houses.
*
There is a Japanese word meaning
to repair broken pottery with gold.
*
The sky is darkening.
How to explain the sadness
I feel in the dark, which is a sadness
inextricable from the darkness.
A sadness specific to the cold.
Dark-sorrow,
when the bed is an iceberg at sea without you.
*
Of course your preferences present
themselves quietly in the layout
of the kitchen. The few things you placed
are shadowy objects at
the edges of a Renaissance painting,
waiting to catch the light
when I’m weak.
*
There is a Cheyenne word for the act
of preparing your mouth to speak.
When I ready mine now
it tastes like metal,
food is unpleasant to chew.
*
I look at my cactus
and even its refusal to grow alone
is nature’s unwavering bell clanging out
when I’m trying to sleep
in the afternoon.
*
The feeling of remembered love
is so easy to put in the oven and heat up.
It’s your hair I long for
when my hands are empty.

 

As glass
from the moment it is born
knows this shade of grey
the uncertain light that catches it

so your hands
knew in advance
they were the scales that weighed
the fullest of our hours.

Look, a postulate. Did you make a wish?

I did indeed. Did you make one too?

Yes.

It doesn’t count.

As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour
before the house had woken to make sure
that everything was in order with The Lie,
his drip changed and his shackles all secure.

I was by then so practiced in this chore
I’d counted maybe sixteen weeks or more
since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye.
Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.

I was at full stretch to test some ligature
when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore
his gag away; though as he made no cry,
I kept on with my checking as before.

Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:
it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor.
The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky
and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.

He was a boy of maybe three or four.
His straps and chains were all the things he wore.
Knowing I could make him no reply
I took the gag before he could say more

and put it back as tight as it would tie
and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door.

– Don Paterson (adapted)