Author: James Lindesay

A silver-chased baroque pearl
on its crystal mount
threatens with a tiny fork

cunningly contrived whalebone
and sealbone   coral trove
sparkles in a new setting

a gilded wafering nautilus
on which is engraved (in Latin)
ship of fools

not locus if you will but envelope

I feel your whisper’s touch- which is absurd;
all talk is parallel, it has no end.
We never meet, imprisoned in our words.

We are oblique; our passions pass unheard
above the chatter, all we comprehend.
I feel your whisper’s touch, which is absurd.

Hear the deceit in confidences shared,
the distances, the partners that pretend;
we never meet, imprisoned in our words.

All our untruths, spoken or inferred,
form fortresses, a wailing wall. Deafened,
I hear your whisper’s touch- which is absurd.

And yet, and yet. Perhaps my space is curved,
the dumb can utter, brittle silence bend;
we never meet, imprisoned in our words.

Complicating, splendid, undeserved,
this language speaks to me of ladders, and
I feel your whisper’s touch (which is absurd,
we never meet) imprisoned in your words.

In Behlehem and long ago
the angels walked upon the snow

God was their neighbour; in His youth
He spoke the pregnant virgin truth

but later, when He came of age
He talked of Hell and sacrilege

In Bethlem now the angels sing;
the wise men think of everything.

I count to one, you count to three
the bones fall partially

the green the spinning table rakes
there are no mistakes

no end of it and many ways
to the uncomforting baize

where more is less, lack, loss
our bodies calcinous

however articulate, they
lie now, have had their say

Previously published in PN Review 163 (2005)

I: CORAL

I went and came
of each thing asking
the name

II: SIGN

My sign is Death: I, however, bear
an inner balance, an alliance
of solitude with outerworldly things.

III: HANDS

Hollow with having
Stretched with desire
Fresh with abandonment
Rapt with surprise
Restless with touching and not taking

IV: ON THE LOVE OF ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

With your span I measured out the world
And in the just balance of your shoulders
Hung the sun’s gold, the pallor of the moon

V: CANTE JONDO

Moonless the night whereon my love departed
Nameless those who will carry through the streets
The bare now lifeless body that was mine

VI: PENELOPE

It is in the dark that I unpick my way.
All of this weaving, none of it is true
but merely time spent killing time.
Each day how far, each night how very close indeed.

VII: BARE FACE

Bare face in direct light

Left face, suspended, permeable
In slow osmosis
Mouth open as if for drinking
Attentive head

Unmade face
Unrefusing face wherein nothing is justified
Face given to the agony of command
Face that voices penetrate

Sluggish face
Presentiment that orchards might secrete
Abandoned and transparent face
As greeted by the blackest nights of love

Long shafts of coldness dart upon the sea
In silence the landscapes are exalted
And solitude is stony to the touch

Lost face
Buried there by the bitter winds of thirst
Lamented by the purest ocean waves

VII: MORNING

As the fruit displays
if cut in two
the freshness of its heart

so does the morning
I am about to start.

IX: L’AGE D’AIRAIN

Slowly, slowly, before the light
charged with shadows and with weight
your body, shuddering to its root.

The tips of your fingers bear a flight
in the wind’s vertex, and at first light
lost to your fingers, there a wing beats.

I: PYRAMID

To crush: to pierce: to commemorate:
it has construed them all. Numbered from much
to nothingness, a figure is described
within the focus of its undoing.

II: SPIRAL

out of its pitch and fall
a voice in the stair-well

a shell speaks   hide in me
hardness is bodily

hardness   a forged retreat
is there no end to it?

III: CURVES

are for following
around (if needs must)
the bend smilingly

often the product
of square formulae
they are infinite

and of no matter
if then plotted then
always inexact

I: HORIZON

It is an angle of attack
the line an argument might take
for some it is a winning streak

It is the sliver of pure black
where saints and sailors disembark
somewhere to rest or a long walk

II: MNEMONIC in remembrance of me

Speechless, they gather to be fed
to lay the tables in the head
to cover them with flesh and blood

Arresting images indeed
idiots, lips moving as they read
the dead feasting upon the dead

III: EXPLORAÇÃO

It was too strange to be ignored
was too desirable for words
it was the startling cry out loud

America. New-found reward.
A silence promptly overpowered
by speakers of the True Word.

IV: INTERIOR

One by one the fingers curl
clench unclenching round the bowl.
A teacup clatters and is still.

Christ you drive me up the wall
How an argument can fill
this empty house a new hell.

Previously published in PN Review 163 (2005)

the failing heart
the distant rock
the voyage out
the swimming back

the empty sand
the hollow word
the shaken hand
the flaming sword

the ass’s jaw
the wooden horse
the open door
whose name is loss

Heathchester is tense and sullen. He knows.
Seduced by a governess at three, his start
in life was not a very good one.
Saturn is afflicted in his chart.

The servants are speechless and grim. They know.
But why does Mrs Danvers climb the tower
to wave her candle in the dark?
Every night, food is left at the back door.

His new bride is plain and worried. She knows
nothing. The housekeeper shows her up
and gives her only half the keys.
She tests the bed and thinks about lost sheep.

What is the meaning of it all? God knows.
The moon has clouded over, and the mire
claims yet another hungry soul.
Someone in the attic starts a fire.

An Etch A Sketch of a landscape
water then beach then water
a scratch in the mhachair
as we watch and watch
the croaking corn
chittering
and then
gone

Keats @JKprowling_nightingale

Jug Jug indeed. I’d like to get wasted but the ideas just keep coming. Out of the body and into the light and back again, a pretty bad trip.

Shelley @smackmybyssheup_skylark

Hi guy I really hear you wherever you are. Got the message: it’s hard to be blue in the blue. You’re living the dream, but sadly we’re awake!

Hopkins @manleyguy_windhover

It’s good to be fit, to play the ace, to hit the hole-in-one. We improve with use; as golfers say: the more I practice, the luckier I get.

Hughes @tedhead_crow

Folk & flock & fuck & feathers & filth. All things considered, we’re a lot like you: better to be black than hungry, better clever than good.

One for the lying warm in bed
bathed in blue mid-morning snowlight

One for the summoning of birds
with offerings of grain and fat

One for the whitening of skies
to silence footprints overnight

And one for the blackening
of enemies’ fingers, just like that

Turned blood-orange by the sun
this earth is a cursive text
a wall bearing many tongues:

Nazinger è maiale
Black is no terror   Beauty
is the only true revolt

II

The city as walled garden:
a flux of secret waters
and the force of argument

Dreams and grieving populate
these hazardous birth-canals:
expulsion as fiat lux

III

Grown from a single pixel
the lovers blossom for us:
his gipsy bling   her tattoos

Creatures of light and delight
they ignore meanings are loose
in their punkabestia

Here we go again
beneath each cross a footnote
of wailing women

history as one
long cry of pain that shudders
on to the next time

as if it mattered
this taking of dictation
write it down, write now

Previously published in The Warwick Review (2012)

Edvard

Mons Pubis bloodset and sunshot as he
makes lightfall, shuttering out the day

Lamplit, the worm and spirochaete are drawn
to these sheets, an expressive slithering

That eschews varnish. Alone in the dark
he summons vampires, would deny their gifts

Too long a life, an ill-becoming
sobriety, the Goebbels imprimatur

August

Cliffs of black diorite coagulate
in turbid seas, an infarct of the soul

A risen grave, the whispering voices
that hold nothing sacred, favour the obscene

Reflections, on and of, our nearest and
dearest: family histories of disease

Here at Blå Tornet, on the balcony
he dies at least a man of the people

Jean

A flatness resonates across the lake
the colour of nothing, of a bad mood

The birds are flown and now the nights grow long
his forests build a cleansing autumn fire

For the mind’s ear, and for a hearth replete
with tributes and visitations. Look hard

And listen closely: you can almost hear
the long silence out of Järvenpää.

Henrik

ACT IV: This is the house of the Master
windows downstage open onto the void

A huge caldera, dormant for now
beyond the trappings of an old religion

Drained of all meaning, scrawling in the earth
his demons turn their faces to the door

He enters, stands as he must before us
the Hero, homeless in this strange landscape

The blades are sharp   the blades are short
the edges trim and yards apart
nothing and nobody shall hurt
this manicured paved-over heart

Form as a purpose: the heron
as a gun-metal grey machine
stock-still over these wetland planes:
a weld of eye and beak and claw
drawn to a focus: a next meal
called into being by a spear.

So quick you probably missed it,
that lick, that flash of a C-word
before us: clip, claw, crescent moon,
the poise and bound of a great cat;
this is perfection of the wound,
scimitar, beauty beyond bone.

Cutlery tinkers in the skull
as etiquette becomes our meal
we are defiled   our heads are full
of numbers and of ritual
of tics and the pulling of hair
nothing and nobody can clear
this bar   this blood-brain barrier

​​

Once we were spooled, unreeling,
replayable endlessly;
even now we re-run it,
pause & rewind, overwrite
& splice in our search for it;
that line: our selves as they were
in the cassette memory.

Keep looking: the picture blurs
& shakes & all the colours
are wrong & the tape catches
& tangles in the machine;
the remote, the book of words,
the guarantee, they’re all gone:
all we have is this blank screen.