October:
Anthony Costello :The battle of the sexes
A strange treatment onlove, with echoes
of Sirk and Rosselini: anachronistic sex
in a cable car above some alpine state,
a pencil-skirted, platinum blonde … American?
A dark-haired man in suit and tie … Italian?
She considers their fleeting romance ‘platonic’
but, empathetic to his character and need,
hands the gentleman a handkerchief.
She turns her back and he turns his,
as- cut to mise en scène – he masturbates.
As an act of kindness, it seems
enlightened, unlike the attempted rape
of Athena, the shot load of Hephaestus,
her foster-son, on her virgin’s thigh.
Wiped off and dropped to earth
on a scrap of wool, a boy germinates,
who is reared by Gaia and placed,
on Athena’s orders, into the box where
he grows to the length of a serpent:
Erichthronius
frightening to death the women who lift
the lid and look inside, the kind of half-man
half-snake that curls around your neck.
John Duffy: Gravity and the bairn
” I didna ken whaur I was, or what I was daein,
nae mair nor a soukin bairn. H. Hunter, Edinburgh. 1894″
Gravity grips the moses basket,
pins the baby to the sheet –
holds us to the Earth,
cradles Sun and planets.
Brick, stone, cement and wood
shelter this flight of stairs, this room;
stand tensed against that weightiness
and the baby, who knows none
of the words for gravity,
waves arms in the air, kicks off
the quilt, lets the hand teach –
reaches, grasps a toy, lifts and squints:
inside the skull, sparks leap
from lobe to lobe; beneath the skin
nerves, sinews, veins churn,
roots in a springtime meadow.
One day she’ll stand, this bairn,
speak and sing and cry and laugh;
rattle the bars; put down the mighty.
November:
Wendy Pratt: Pluviophile
When it comes; thick and soft
as the pelt of an animal,
I am grounded, brought down
to calm in the smell of damp earth.
We wait like the wet starlings,
under tree cover, their song-work
undone in the shallow hiss
of leaves and rain. I am paused,
smelling the green of the grass,
the hung heads of daffodils,
watching the plough furrows
fill with water. A dog barks
somewhere, on one of the farms,
the spaniel lifts his wet head, waits
as I wait, we are communed,
marooned, standing peacefully,
watching the water make mud
out of soil, movement out of stillness.
Laura Potts: Yesterday Calling
Somewhen,
a gull snaps its wings
and laughs
as I stretch out the past
to the city with its dark heart
and us,
splitting our skins for a kiss.
On the rim of a memory,
spinning,
we fizz
like silver pins
on that street
or this.
My lover’s words I remember
trembled
like globed pearls on tepid stars
the hot dark of torchlight
kicking
from the pavement
sparks
as he went.
Bone-bent,
with eighty-six years in my face,
I read books
and play cards
and years have dried up,
slow prunes
in a vase.
But last,
in my crabbed hands his skin,
doused with river lights,
no foul breath of wartime but
a whole lost world of long-kissed nights,
thin films of eyes candled bright
in the lobes of my palms,
the four-medal arms deliberate,
passionate,
strong.
Afterwards, the distant salute of a bomb.
Stephanie Bowgett: Baba Yaga’s daughters
You never could tell us apart,
that one in the mirror and me.
Wolves in the forest howl, yellow as yolk
and Bublik, we know you are one of their ilk;
why else would we languish, pine for you here
in a house that struts on the legs of a hen?
And this is a riddle
I riddle for you:
Why have one girl
when you can have two?
Listen! Our mother is pounding home
grinding stars in her mortar.
She wants you
for a lampshade
on a post by the door,
And we agree, me and the one
you mistake for me. Cornered,
your eyes are wide as a girl’s.
We giggle, kiss your loose lips,
pass you from tongue to tongue
dissolve you like sherbet,
me and my sister, the silver needle,
threaded behind my lapel,
She stitches you up in the hem of my skirt.
Swing there heavy, while I clap,
clap, clap to the balalaika;
arms akimbo, pirouette;
stamp my feet in little red boots
Hold tight, Bublik! One of us you’ll wed
but both of us you’ll bed, and Mother,
oh Mother will never know.
And this is a riddle
I riddle for you,
why have one girl
when you can have two?
In the dark they say,
all cats are grey
So too, my dear, are wolves
So too, my dear, are wolves
December:
Yvonne Reddick : V. Resteau, Geologist Manqué
His treasures: eyeflash of tourmaline
in a matrix of white,
wink of gwindel crystals
their shade a warlock’s smokescreen,
an iron rose, the weight
of angular petals,
the blood-lustre garnet
a dark vein between us.
I turn them between my fingers
and see a man with my eyes
make the slow climb from Göschenen to Airolo
across the divide between rivers,
the watershed of languages.
He sips a Ticino red at the Ospizio –
nerves steadier, he hauls on
boots and rubberised Mackintosh,
the miner’s lamp still quavering in one hand.
The cristallier unfurls the rope ladder
and my great-grandmother’s grandfather
shins down to the blind-end fissure –
squirms his head and shoulders
into the cavity of mineral fangs.
An hour later, he emerges,
whiskers thick with dust,
face beaming. In his hand,
a dusty lump of spikes.
He returns to Evian
with the worst torticollis
his doctor has ever seen
and du quartz fumé magnifique.
His peeling specimen-label reads
St Gotthard, 1859.
Still, his careful hand
beckons in sepia ink, to the keyhole pass
So there we are; all our guests from 2016. Thank you, each and every one of them, and thanks to you for turning up throughout the year and being an audience that makes the writing worthwhile. I’m already looking forward to the guests of 2017. Hope you’ll join me. xxx
