How a Laugh Came Easy These Days – Weaker Poems
Weekend
And so we rake over my past
and I take the wheel for the first time
and I push you from my knee
and I slip it into second
and your colouring suits a tan
and two motorcyclists approach
and they’ve modernized the building
and the car’s low so go around that bump
and the sculptor can’t breathe deeply because her lungs are scarred
and your hand should be relaxed on the gearstick, more relaxed
and there are alpacas in that field because an alpaca breeder lives there
and a new clutch will cost you eight hundred pounds
and that was the cough of a fox not the snort of a horse
and it’s power steering so you needn’t turn it much
and Jess makes that noise when she’s happy – deer and rabbit heaven –
and it’s all about the balance between clutch and accelerator
and for Jess it’s sight and for Pepper smell
and always put on the handbrake before you leave a car.
–
She’s just returned from an appraisal,
and I’m arguing about photocopying
before the lessons.
Where am I? Where am I?
I pleaded last night in bed.
The light seeps into my eyes.
I’m sniffing
on a picnic bench.
Treat two Russians to a lesson outdoors.
–
Light coiled in my bones,
eyes too close and twitching.
I find footholes in the gravel
and walk down a chord progression
as teachers arrive, and windows are opened.
A student walks, head down, to the bench.
8.30am. The hottest part of the day.
I am myself this early.
–
I heard the wedding dress was too tight.
It was difficult to move in, and she was an hour
late. The forecast had been for heavy showers
but it had turned out nice.
That the banns weren’t read in my vicinity
and so the marriage didn’t stand.
That she was yelling into the darkness
just for someone to say hello.
–
Since the revelation of their name,
copper beech
like insignia
sit alongside each other like stamps
(regular
asymmetrical.)
They seem everywhere.
The background has stepped forward
By naming, I encounter more,
this naming things and taking hold.
–
Posture
How should I sit in bed,
or at a desk, to read and write?
How write in my lap?
How rest my head on a pillow?
Which pillow to buy?
I mime typing in the middle of the room –
hands low,
monitor exactly central.
Eyes level with the top third of the screen,
the focal length my own,
a pull-out keyboard drawer.
The mouse is level with the keyboard,
the mouse-mat to my left.
I ease back in my chair,
don’t feel a strain.
-
I Lie Priapic
and ponder your disappointment
that the hatch to the loft
didn’t give on to Australia.
Yesterday, you tried the handles
and had to be restrained
in a moving car.
The music from
a pole-dancing class
climbs the fire escape.
-
Five-bar Gate
For two kilometres, wool bleaches on the wire.
This father out taking the air
has the same knowledge,
that five-bar gate, in his face.
His daughter, in the perfect hue of blue jean,
stretches her perfect frame.
In
The Angel, I see her spitting shot from her mouth.
–
The Chalk Bridleway
Milky white
chipped with
hoof prints,
rounded and uneven stone
one degree from clay.
The train compartment cools
as it punctures the night.
–
What I’d made of it
The people whose laughs I coaxed,
hair falling about their necks.
How to look at them
when they were distracted, their eyes
on the road, or hands around a coffee flask,
to watch the lines curve
round their nostrils and from their eyes.
How to talk to them while
playing a hand up the back of their necks
so they didn't notice
but their words assumed the rhythm of the caress.
How a laugh came easy these days.
How there are still some people I can’t show.
How I still need to let go.
–
Between Stations
A young woman stands
at the doors between moving carriages,
her feet above the track.
Her carriage dances away from ours
equidistant but shifting.
Her song reaches us,
but her lungs hardly have the energy to expel it.
We just hear the hum
and see her eyes
massaged in their cups.
'Close the door love, it's cold.'
Each time the door swings closed
she stops, considers and pushes it open again,
her balance an exhausted certainty.
She plays it, to-froing the wood on its hinges,
its weight, her counterweight.
Each time she uses a muscle
her blood quickens
and she glows in her temples.
As she presents her unguarded body
in the doorway
there's nothing to prevent looking at her:
her eyes' soft inroads;
her disregard should she fall from view
between two carriages'static arms.
