Two Poems
Playing on words by Maria Stadnicka and Jessica Mookherjee
Palimpsest I
Imagine this: a carriage crossing the steppes;
you are leaning against the window
singing, watching the spiders;
barbed wire turns to light
and someone looks like you
in some workplace surrounded by boxes.
In your chest is a bird
caught by the opening
lungs knocking against frozen hours;
our approach is heading north,
the landscape accelerating,
fingers touching cold glue.
The sounds move in circles,
smaller and smaller, our eyes
as far off as birds.
From our careless enclosure
we like to see ourselves fall, knowing
the physical nature of human pain,
perfume of amber, sacks of oil
and oozing fish skins,
animal damage and a fog
of our own blood, transported
by sea. The train exists only
in our stomachs – we have no time
to make good all we have undone,
broken, boiled, muscles extracted,
fire and string by the ditch.
Our face turns north, through glass
hours spread frozen on thin cellophane ribbons,
curved mud, hand sliding easily over a map.
We shred a broken ship,
keep a wreck in style,
and all your spilled shopping –
the wafer, the wine, the whale blood,
coal and dripping fat, the damned
owls still dancing
and all the things we’ll need
when the weather gets bad.
Labelled samples from the surgery,
genetic disordering,
which so seldom makes the news.
We wake in a series of assemblies,
tailing off beyond
the dipping four-wave coastline,
then commercials, green glass
sea and we are still
sleeping outside
on our common ground.
Palimpsest II
They have bought me a fragrance
from all the dead whales
found in the sleeves, upcountry flesh
and all. Taken by the tailfin, we keep
clear of the burning ship, watching
the milk sour and blacken – are you
married now? The milk
tastes of newsprint. He handles her hair
as if it were an udder.
Aidan Semmens, author of four poetry collections, A Stone Dog (2011), The Book of Isaac (2013), Uncertain Measures (2014) and Life Has Become More Cheerful (2017), has been described by Simon Smith, former chief librarian at the Poetry Library, as 'one of our more ambitious and accomplished poets'. He is also the editor of By The North Sea: an anthology of Suffolk poetry (2013) and of the online poetry magazine Molly Bloom.
www.aidansemmens.co.uk
