1847 c/o Rebecca Perry

had a presentiment
in the bottom of my heart

came home to the funeral
the little door
the earliest flowers
the first flakes of snow

i was superstitious
about my dreams
in which
shameless little boys
dragged her pillow away
stole her snowy shoes

the wilderness
the moors
flowers
a south wind
scented leaves
snow under the black hollow

inside
the round table
dry shoes
warm wine gingerbread
turkey duck pigeon
the fancy world

about my dreams
in which
a man
fierce pitiless wolfish
walked through walls
like wine through water
how he hung over her pillow

the room her room
a handful of golden crocuses
on the pillow
her head place
her clothes
people vaguely regarding the flowers
every shade
the snow yards deep
suffocating snow

the round table
beef mutton ham
i call her a darling
is not the snow almost gone
(a lie)
now we should all have peace
(a lie)
that is how i’m loved now
& haunted

about my dreams
in which
it finally happens
her nun-like veil
rarely lifted
lifted
she tore the pillow with her teeth

1754 c/o Rebecca Perry

On serendipity


Fortuitous happenstance indeed                             the way the fresh water stream
bent in the ground                  at each perfect angle              not necessarily required of it
to greet your toes          when the sun was stripped back and hot hot enemy
yes burning                and you felt so desperate       lost            your brain without instruction
began recalling             the body and face              of the first person
you thought you loved          smell            hair           teeth              hip bone
meeting stomach                    sweet spit                            at the same time as hard crying
                        and preparing to die

Then serendipitous too                      the way the apples pushed out their shoulders
to fill one hundred shining green coats            hanging from branches                          waiting
for your aching teeth                   your sandy tongue                        honey too
there was honey in the trunk           shade                    have you ever been more thankful?

And look also          the way the blue of the sky                             mixes with the yellow
of its sun                         now also your sun once again                                       to make
a green          so truly transfixing                                        as this

1657 c/o Rebecca Perry

  

Girl King

   

  
The first thing I did was be born. My screams were so loud they thought I was a boy.
Someone said, like a thousand fists punching through a thousand windows. The summer was so hot the orchard caught fire, and water dripped down the insides of the palace windows and rotted the wood.

The second thing I did was kill Descartes. The winter was so cold you could crunch on flower petals like ice. His lungs froze up. I had told him not to come in winter. I told him to go home. But men don’t listen to women. In this way I became a murderer.

The third thing I did was run away, naturally.

1573 c/o Rebecca Perry

Seated Figure of Summer

I know there is only one way it can go
from here, my sitting spot in the shade
with my back to the sinking sun –

these half peach cheeks will shrink and fall
and my brow of grapes will wrinkle to raisins
for the little birds to peck at in twos and threes.

My parsnip fingers, all heavy and wet
will not be able to pinch their wings
and return them to their branches.

This torso of apples and figs will sink back
and blacken like the opening of a cave –
all my colours gone.

Ants will march into me and carry off
the stalks and pips for a new home, elsewhere,
and I will hollow, hollow, hollow.

My corn cob arms and legs will loosen
and fall away like rotten teeth -
the yellow to brown and all my colours gone.

The pears of my heels will soften with each step.
Small brown patches of mush will give way
and I will fall, here or there,

all my colours gone,
with none of a melting snowman’s grace
and some ridiculous final thought.

1522 c/o Rebecca Perry

Last night a pigeon with perfectly clean feet
landed on my shoulder,
pecked at the chain around my neck -
and, little did we know it then,
I was appearing somewhere else entirely
thousands of miles away.

Tomorrow night, all being well,
I will sit and look out of a high window
remembering this time last year,
tracing the silhouettes of buildings for similarities –
the intonations of closed curtains, the sky,
the differences between feelings now
and feelings then – how much whiter scars,
how much tougher feet, how much fixed the broken.

For now I will sit alone in bed and feast.
I will eat beetroot, cured meats.
I will eat strawberries. There will be wine -
until my hands are red to the wrists and shining.
Then how much covered the passions,
coral-still and silenced.

1500 c/o Rebecca Perry

Leda

on the floor
still for hours
darkness passed a long time since
nevertheless
the house smell is paint
the walls are not dry yet, somehow

nipples are still sore
one hand sweats onto a white feather
the other between her legs
the tip of her index finger inside
is cold, purplish

her hair is tangles of fishing wire
is cablano
she smells different, even to herself
is some wreck
is a shipwreck
is wet between her thighs
puttana maybe, she thinks, puttana

something is moving inside of her
arms as wings
flutters and starts
her ribcage is shells
the delicacy of eggshells
everything is

1489 c/o Rebecca Perry

amazed by the caution of human gesture

i

breathe your lungs out into the air
maybe the birds will feel the expansion of it.

ii

perhaps the air right now
could only smell this one way
with its billion component parts
and dead skin of the not-living
and fires and weather conditions
and tastes of spices in and out
of our mouths, insides, mouths

iii

we carry the small fragments of ourselves
like parrots on our shoulders
the socks lined up neat as conkers
the firmly held belief that it is lucky
to be hit in the face by a falling leaf.

iv

we are allowed to cry in the toilets at work
when someone young dies
quickly and quietly.

v

i feel as if my body once held two people
and now I am lost inside this stretched out skin
a little deaf, perhaps heartbroken,
walking on, unable to keep out the cold.

vi

there are heroes, yes
people mountains were made for

vii

when there is not enough for us
we will go to the moon
and dig and break. we will gather
up sunlight and bring it back
in drums and boxes and vaults

viii

you – pen, paper, biscuit –
saying house, bridge, fountain, gate,
jug, tall grass, fruit-tree, window –
at most: column, tower, castle

ix

see: the Rider, the Staff, Fruit-Garland
see stars - see both living and being dead,
or the possibility of it.
see Ursa Major, see the one that looks like
a something and then something else again

x

tell me how good it is
to wake from a bad dream
and have someone there and I will tell you
how butterfly wings stay dry in the rain

1484 c/o Rebecca Perry

1469 c/o Rebecca Perry

An extract from Elia Levita Bachur’s
Bovo-Buch, generally regarded as
the most outstanding poetic work
in Old Yiddish

this love
your own mother could try to poison you
you wouldn’t even notice
it could kill a sultan even
it could keep you alive
without food or sun in a prison cell
for exactly one year

it could
probably you won’t understand
jump down a horse’s throat
and buck its heart from the inside
it could make a horse magic
magic heart, magic hoofs
faster than sand storms
a horse capable of saying
its own name Rundele

it would
come into the forest with you
when you have to run away again
from men with black teeth
and you are warm inside the woman
who may as well have been your wife forever
pressing down into the leaves and earth

and then
still there when she is big as a cloud
her scream louder than mountains falling
and then when she has a twin
in each arm-nook
her eyes like mushroom caps
unblinking, soft, waiting for something

1460 c/o Rebecca Perry

[click to embiggen]

1445 c/o Rebecca Perry

1425 c/o Rebecca Perry

Buttons

There were guards dotted along the border like buttons.
The border was a red line an inch or two thick.
The red was the red of traffic lights;
the traffic lights all said stop, so did the line.
The line was painted straight onto the pavement.
The pavement was light grey on one side,
that grey was the colour of pencil lead;
the pavement on the other side was dark grey,
that grey was the colour of wet elephants.

The guards wore black uniforms, they had guns.
The uniforms were trimmed with big silver buttons,
the silver buttons shone like teeth in the moonlight.
The guns were small, the size of a hand.
The guards walked along the line, they never crossed.
They walked at the speed of slow-running water.
They had one job only, the guards,
that job was to keep Nanjing the same size.
That size was the biggest city in the world.

They came at night, when the guards swapped.
The guards swapped at 3am.
3am was the darkest and the quietest time.
The darkness hid them; them in their black tops,
them with their soft black shoes.
Those black shoes toed the red line, crossed it.
The hands with black gloves glued silver coins
to the pavement, coins embossed with ‘Beijing’.
They glued the coins onto the red line, they covered it.

In this way Beijing grew at 3am every day;
it eeked over the red line by a square foot each night.
Those feet, over time, became a whole square mile
and that metal mile made all the difference.
The red line had to be redrawn around the coins,
jagged like a dinosaur’s back. The Nanjing guards
ripped their buttons off and threw them in with the coins.
Conceding, swapping sides, wanting to be part,
as they always had been, of the biggest city in the world.

1419 c/o Rebecca Perry

When You Are Preceded by Phillip the Bold

I am fine on a horse. On a horse there is no stopping me. For my last birthday King Sigismund sent me a stallion the colour of coal. The saddle was purple, and soft like a horse’s nose; it had sans peur in gold letters on one side and a lightning bolt on the other. They say that there is no one faster than me, which is very possibly true. When I’m on a horse I feel like I’m riding on the back of a whale, skimming towards the sun, which is an open mouth, which will swallow me whole and let me live inside its hot gold belly. I am fine on a horse. They say that I am fearless and on a horse that is true. I like horse’s hind legs; they are terrifying in a good way.

I am not fine off a horse. I am terrified my legs will buckle if I break into a run. My wife says my thighs are princely, she says they are princely and she grabs one with her whole hand. I am terrified when there are red or brown flecks in my apples. I am terrified my ankles will crack. I am terrified when my wife checks my testicles. I am terrified of taking the last barley sugar from the pack. I am terrified of cheese mould. I am terrified of fire, water and big trees. My wife likes to dance, she holds out her hand to me and looks at me and I have to dance with her. I am terrified of what my knees will do. I am terrified when I hold my breath in the bath and I hear my own heartbeat slowing in my ear drums. I am terrified of pronouncing words wrong in public. I am terrified of coins in Christmas puddings.

Sometimes at night I fold back my half of the sheet and lay it over my wife. I am sweating because I have dreamt about something terrifying like my ears, which never stop growing, getting bigger than the length of my face, or eating a nut I have never eaten before and being allergic, horribly allergic. So I go out to the kitchen and find a carrot or a salt block and I go the back way round to the stables. Usually I go to Mahog, he lives in the back corner, he smells like tree bark, he is the colour of conkers. I sit on his back in my night robe and I feel calmer than when I am in a chair by the fire. He shifts from hoof to hoof, he paws the sawdust patiently, he puffs. I look through the holes in the stable wall grain and, if the moon is out, I imagine I am heading there on horseback, climbing hill after hill, slowly, swaying; and when I get there I will look down at earth and realise there is nothing to be terrified of at all in all that green and blue. I will laugh at myself and do a somersault.

1406 c/o Rebecca Perry

John II of Castile becomes King aged 22 months.

During the coronation he started to lick his royal garb,
then he put a whole fist full in his mouth and chewed it.
I’d wondered if that might happen, knowing his love for peaches.
He started to make a sound like a duff violin note
every time he saw his own feet; they’d pinned rubies to his shoes.
He dropped the orb immediately; it hit the marble floor,
and rolled down the aisle like a grenade, bouncing off the pews.
The Archbishop’s hand flew to his heart, rings flashing like fire
in the spotlight, the congregation gasped collectively.
He snatched the silver spoon and tried to feed himself
the anointing oil, it dribbled down his chin and on to his collar,
his tongue flicked over and over his shiny little teeth.
He stared at the wobbly reflection of his face in the apple of gold.
The crown slid off his head like a blob of ice cream from a cone.
He started to cry and didn’t stop. He was King.

1405 c/o Rebecca Perry

Usquebaugh

We keep the pot still in the old prayer room.
It steams up the high windows and fuzzes over
the face of Saint Benedict we have framed above the door.
We lean our backs to it when we copy out scripture.
The wood is warm through our robes and eases our bones,
it smells like fire and makes our eyes sting.
Some of us think of it as a big heart, burning, bubbling.

During afternoon prayers Brother Deicola’s voice
had quavered through the corridors.
He tore at his belt, he cupped his red face in his hands,
he pressed his forehead to his brothers’ cheeks,
he lay down in the oratory and muttered
about salvation and a fire in the pit of his stomach.
His breath smelt like the prayer room.

We found Brother Ciaran beside an oak barrel;
splayed, florid, grinning like a mad man.
He begged us all drink from the barrel,
he told us we would all feel that the very breath of God
was in our throats, whispering to us His wisdom,
he called it aqua vitae, usquebaugh, he called it the water of life.
We offered our prayers and we drank.

Our bones were coaxed from the inside out,
we moved through the monastery as smoothly as ghosts.
We sang together in the courtyard so our voices
would best carry in the wind and up to the sky.
We vowed to cleanse the drink from orange to gold;
once for the Father, once for the Son and once
for the Holy Spirit; we slept in absolute peace.