2 Poems by Kerry Hardie

Poplars

He planted poplars
too bard and graceful for that lumpy hillside.
In winter she'd no shelter
from wind or their only neighbours,
their windows inching closer.

But spring came and the poplars
swayed in the sweeter wind like temple dancers.
She saw that he could wait
for a place in his life where the light turned
leaves into running water

What's Left
(for Lu)

I do not move much beyond matter.
What is touched, seen, heard.

The stunned bird kicks in my hand.
I watch its eyes dull and glaze over.
It is mute, warm, dead.

I trust in its death.
That it lived, that it died.
Stay. Hold out your hand.
your fingers linked his.
My hand seeks yours.
This is the chain of belonging.
This is as much as I know.

---
from the wonderful 'The Zebra Stood In The Night'

The Snow Party by Derek Mahon

The Snow Party

(for Louis Asekoff)

Basho, coming
To the city of Nagoya,
Is asked to a snow party.

There is a tinkling of china
And tea into china;
There are introductions.

Then everyone
Crowds to the window
To watch the falling snow.

Snow is falling on Nagoya
And further south
On the tiles of Kyoto;

Eastward, beyond Irago,
It is falling
Like leaves on the cold sea.

Elsewhere they are burning
Witches and heretics
In the boiling squares,

Thousands have died since dawn
In the service
Of barbarous kings;

But there is silence
In the houses of Nagoya
And the hills of Ise.

from Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton

Water

Water is elemental, it's what we're made of, what we can't live within or without. Trying to define what swimming means to me is like looking at a shell sitting in a few feet of clear, still water. There it is, in sharp focus, but once I reach for it, breaking the surface, the ripples refract the shell. It becomes five shells, twenty- five shells, some smaller, some larger, and I blindly feel for what I saw perfectly before trying to grasp it.

To His Lost Lover by Simon Armitage

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 slept like buried cutlery -

two spoons or forks cupped perfectly together,
or made the most of some heavy weather -

walked out into hard rain under sheet lightening,
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 tasted the fruit,

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 the right thing,
or put it in writing.

And never fled the black mile back to his house
before midnight, or coaxed another button of her blouse,

then another,
or knew her

favourite colour,
her taste, her flavour,

and never ran a bath or held a towel for her,
or soft soaped her, or whipped her hair

into an ice-cream cornet or a beehive
of lather, or acted out of turn, or misbehaved

when he might have, 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 brushed with his thumb the nut of her nipple,
or drank intoxicating liquors from her navel.

Or christened the Pole Star in her name,
or shielded the mask of her face like a flame,

a pilot light,
or stayed the night,

or steered her back to that house of his,
or said 'Don't ask me to say how it is

I like you.
I just might 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 never meant them -
sweet nothings anybody could have mentioned.

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

from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Trading Cities 4

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or grey or black and white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood , of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them , the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.

From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still further away.

Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spider webs of intimate relationships seeking a form.

---

A treat of a book, picked up in armchair books in Edinburgh

Early Japanese Poetry from The Manyoshu

Remembrance by Anonymous (5th/6th Century)

On winter evenings when the mist hangs low
Over the reed beds and the reeds look blue
And chill,chill,chill

                                the wild ducks call each other,

I shall remember you.

A Grain of Sand by Anonymous (7th Century)

No. I shall not die for love.
I lack the discipline
To face the waves and drown in them.
My nature is to spin
Around and around like a grain of sand
Whenever a tide flows in.

Fishing Lanterns by Anonymous (8th Century)

As down behind the mountain rim
The moon begins to sink,
Across these wide dark wastes of water
Fishing lanterns blink
And, when we think ourselves alone
Far out on the midnight sea,
There comes the sound of plashing oars
Yet farther out than we.

----
translations by Graeme Wilson in 'From the Morning of The World'

Karl Ove Kausgaard - Essentialism,Fiction and Writing

What I was trying to do, and what all writers try to do - what on earth do I know? - was to combat fiction with fiction. What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are. In other words revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out...

from A Death In The Family(My Struggle 1)
Trans. Don Bartlett