Magpieing the colour blue a seam of sky, in the pocket of my too worn jeans, where yellow crabbing days wore through, coins and threads lost like summer (I guess) a horse of cloud and air leapt in a lunge, the trident shape Poseidon’s scowl in wavelets cast against the sleepful gabions ah, futility, Ulysses thought the stained glass, of a martyr’s eye cyclopean in the way it fixed a furied vein, the bolt-tight gun-metal jaw, ricochet and gutter blunt, a crown above the minotaur with blasphemies and buckled wheel, half turning seesaw back in the blind, almost crow-black breakneck intercession
Author: C S Hughes
White feather
Water sheds from each leaf Something white and feathery, in that susurration As if the poplar, in bird guise Was wont to fly away, but shamed By the brute, demarcating quill To hold and shiver, await A falling axe I think it was a goose, I don’t know why They once thought a sign suitable for cowardice A piercing bird, high and far-journeying With that strange lifelong bonded love That we wish we had In the misshape of our victories Somehow, more important than a war A feather fallen to the grass Jewelled with droplets In the placid, stillness in between The morning’s chasing rain An unwanted grace Gone in the next upswirling breeze
A door to the far side of the world
Sidle through, the door jammed To that narrowing perspective Where if you leave or if you stay amounts To two scraped arcs Worn into the boards Never touching but Almost the same In a curving universe, the mathematicians say All parallel lines will eventually meet But it seems, this exit Will only ever go one way
Amanuensis in declining summer
We slow, walking into water Lapping salt, uncertain how to speak Arched words, in the face Of an amniotic resistance To advancing life Remember how the Madonna grieved When her child rose again Counting days like seagulls Above a garbage shore On your holiday towel the stains Of eggs and leavened bread Sister what’s-your-name Can you spare a coin for love? You have a gravid face Breaking open sunshine Just a quiet deception Something fragrant in your mouth Crushed sweet seeds, a flower An azure sea, a breeze below The moon when summer Turns, more or less, as the hand Before your smile Bent as it repudiates God does not write home With platitudes and dreads Homilies about these dismal Seaside coloured days Sandwiches quite stale How the scavengers are blessed When they steal and beg Other frail beatitudes from your disregard The deck chairs bellows semaphores In candy-coloured cyphers A breath as light as new-made saints On convalescent afternoons
A new rough music
Everyone stays home Catching fishes on TV Standing solemnly in doorways Silent, or loudly praising With voices raised and that tinpot enfilade Once saved to condemn Ringing out The birds, in their confusion After brief reprise Sing new bolder songs In the unfamiliar quiet
Castoff people
You scowl, with that wire coat hanger angularity At castoff people, cuffs and elbows askew Hung on racks in rows marked clearance End of line, stock discontinued, as if Evolution had reached a point Where adaptation were, not now impossible But moot, it is the phenotype that, so often Sways the genotype, but now department stores All look, almost exactly the same One day, I suppose they will fuse my spine With robot wires and cyanoacrylate I will lay, by the crooked looming weight Of an old ghost gum, who bent to weep The noon still river, shades all who choose to sleep But may only ever reach in reflection Still, we wait, a long season To weave new lives and baskets When with that swelling, whispered voice The river rushes bloom
From seed a bird
From the bird seed that I spilled Grows a bloom with eyes like wheels That turn the way the sky chases clouds On spindle legs and crooked wings It gathers bottle caps and things That make a jangle noise That – though voiceless – breathless sings The birds all watch with care and chance As the petals fold and dance A hunger in their tourmaline misrule With whetted beaks and silvered claws In flock and fury pierce the hide Of the creature that, in obeisance stays Til leaves rent and eyes sky-blind Fire yellow from inside Takes wing and flies into the sun
Quote of the day
I get everything in footnotes – Second-hand, used up Meaning depleted To a dull projectile weight Damaging in impact And sinister disreputation That disguises elaborate architectures In an image of itself, the ivy swallows Shivering, in dark green exultation The way a word evaporates Spoken too often and too fast In that aphasic staccato Of unceasing railway cars Crossing points and telegraph lines In bird-like chitter-chatter A name murmured on the phone In hard magnified breaths Nevertheless misunderstood Irreducible as time-worn stones With all the bold effacement Of that immovable wisdom
Fish-child
I caught a fish as big as a bairn On my fiercely knotted twine With a strangely narrow grin And gold and murrey shingles On his crooked skin We named him Wolseley Wollstonecraft (Or Little Wol for short) Mother found a kilt to wrap him in While he sang of seas like deserts Shone glamours on the ceiling Of the church of Kirkcudbright Where we took him to the market To buy a tansy crown Arbuthnot offered sixpence For a half a pound He’s our bonny skirling lad A prince of seas renowned We’ll not be having less than A mutchkin for a stane Mam though in thee I did abide You’ll not sell my fish-child’s song We fled all through the lowering town The crowd an angry gathered throng And from high the heather and tansy crag Fell ere far and long Little Wol away to swim And I alas the river Dee to drown
A brief survey of certain particulars of the history of the next 100 years
One day all cats will look the same Cloned and birthed in an immaculate conception Never realising that Catalan’s constant Like most scientifically useful irrationalities Is only ever a difficult approximation Now George Orwell’s copyright has expired The proliferation of cheaply reproduced copies Will mean that one day 1984 Through the caterpillar smudges Of our AI’s astigmatic Optical character recognition Will become once more 1948; almost none will care Love will eventually devolve to Hate Such words will become in sleight and disregard An episode in the great new patriotic histories Politicians will declare, from war We are making the same cities where you’ve always lived But now with close and unfamiliar neighbours Granting that the square footage is quite small But the landscapes bleakly generous A synthetic stone will last two hundred years Or thereabouts, until rain and moss have left All declarations of love and loss and piety effaced Pi will become 3.1612...recurring While we who contemplate perfection Hoping for a universe in which The ratio of the diameter To the circumference of the circle Always and only ever equals three Under the spreading chestnut tree Can, but in our chagrin, only wait