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Nostalgia

Hissing, calling, bead-makers and text-merchants
on Amen Corner traded prayers with Bread Street

though that naked boy, marking the highest ground
in London, was just a soundless tile in Panyer Alley.

He should have been an embryo of my ear to the past,
an otocyst, or rising the loaves of sixteen-eighty

but all I could hear was trivial history till I saw
how a flying buttress determines fissures in moonlight.

 

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Pollen

O Source du Possible, alimente à jamais
Des pollens des soleils d’exils…
          Jules Laforgue
          (Complaint du Temps et de sa Commere L’Espace)

Broken red slats of a blind horizon
hanging
behind a rope
suspended
between an oak and a concrete post in a clearing

light up a honey-green leaf of girl
fluttering
down the line. Once, boys grasped the handgrip and
launched
into a draft of unsure sky.

Such machinery of
grabbing,
diving,
falling
to the ground once made a cloud
of men, a storm that
rushed
in from a sea. The sun has no time
left for fire. A torch
drops
spots of gold, tiny as pollen grains.

The slats are
sheered
off from the sky, worn out.
She runs beneath them while they
fly down
again and again like rare Red Wakes.

 

copyright © C P Crowther, 2004.

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Claire Crowther here makes her third appearance in Shearsman. She has recently also appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and Poetry Wales.