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NUGGETS
1
Tree twigs clot egg-marbled sky
as day is scraped away
into scents of evening lime.
Clouds intimate as they move:
it’s dangerous to get used to people.
In the morning, the car is splattered
with bird shit. Since birds can’t speak,
they communicate through other means,
trying to warn, trying to mark.
2
The narrator tells me your favourite childhood toy
is meant to reflect you when you’re older:
Action Man fanatic becomes soldier.
I poured sand from one bucket into another,
or, when it rained, decanted rice or pearl barley
from saucepan to bowl on the kitchen floor.
Gestures speak louder than actions,
but movements betray the secrets you think.
3
He is describing something and changes
from the indefinite to the definite article,
which seems to be significant,
whilst I continue to address an envelope
that doesn't yet know its destination.
These days I look over people's shoulders
on trains, to read the top lines of their books.
It can be the left or right page, depending where I stand.
Today it is: "and shone a torch at the door."
4
Water-memory knows to blink
back and forth between the coves,
washing sand eyes to see.
Recently I have started giving things away:
books to strangers; poems to beggars;
gifts bought and not given; skin.
I’ve had this for too long, I say.
5
Walking, I find a plug in the road:
a three-pin plug
attached to thirty centimetres
of cut-off cable.
I dream of drowning
a girl and wearing her black ring.
We are born telepathic
but begin to lose it,
hide it in a crypt of unremembering,
as though it’s too dangerous to mix
these things up with the everyday.
There’s no milk left.
Poets in Residence @ 3rd London
Poetry Festival 2007
Briony Dennis
Inua Ellams
Juli Jeana
Tom Chivers
Tricia Peak |
6
Vertigo threatens to spill onto the crossword linoleum,
transcending point, line, and plane.
The black and the white are crumpled by shadow;
stacked polystyrene cups graduated in tone and height;
three bowls of water: hot, cold, warm, and two hands.
I crinkle my eyes to see oolite patterns
amongst turban-folds of vibrating light.
When the self is strong, make an imprint
of this feeling to regenerate it.
Make prints - you must.
7
These floorboards are peppered with creaks
in one place, like an old misunderstanding
wanting to put two mistaken people right.
I don’t tread there. I select the silent CD
from turret piles flanking the wall,
slip it into the player. I point the speaker
at the road, where loud traffic conveyor-belts along;
bathe in the anaesthetic blaring from the machine.
Huba
Days and words open on themselves and won't quite shut.
The tide receded in the dream.
It was centuries ago,
before the guns and waters rose.
She levitated to the ceiling;
looked at her feet to wake up.
Are we afraid to look at things
because we fear they will fade
with our sight upon them?
If that's true, it follows that they disappear
when we look them in the eye;
but what of the things that stay?
Meanings reside
in the difference repetition makes
when arrival is neither sought nor desired,
or in symbols reaching beyond our comprehension
Qualia
Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication =96 Godard
Frozen in a salty equinox of loam and sea,
together with land's consciousness I counter:
if instead of our memories,
we were made of our forgettings,
if instead of seeing what we did,
we reconstructed what we missed in our blinks,
if instead of secreting what we thought,
we drew a circle and stepped inside?
Teeth lightning weeps bleeding branches.
A dead bird has fallen from the goblet.
I collect phonemes from the dream,
assemble them into a coloured graph.
Cinefilm tram-rattles industrial scapes.
A diagonal hat; red walls; machines.
March Poet in Residence 2007: Helen Long
April Poet in Residence 2007: Alan McKean
May Poet in Residence 2007: Kerry-Fleur Schleifer
June
Poet in Residence 2007: David Mclean
June Poet in Residence Tricia Peak
July Poet in Residence Maggie Sullivan
Visit the Page of March (2006) Poet in Residence Alan Buckley's Page
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