March 2021
(After Joan Mitchell’s Sunflowers)
you can’t reach from one side to the other
without moving your entire body
several steps along the dance of sap
& windswept paint to follow the sun
or hum an invocation to a changing
season inside & between us gravity
encouraging roots away from all this sky
& sunlight orchestrating a history of ideas
to do with turning our heads to the light
with a sense of energetic purpose such as
making tons of oily seeds for hamsters
or being as luminous as possible for
a few weeks on the way to more uncertainty
there’s a gap down the middle to remind
us all about the plural step over it
April 2021
(After May, by Julia Ball)
we hold out pencils at arm’s length & squint
while our minds paint something other
imagined through this valley in the sky
an ongoing invitation
to a further excursion
through the concluding seasons of a life
where imagined structures hover
in the breathing tones & shades of Chardin
a rhythmic congregation
in a bog-standard communion
with softening light over & over the fen
an unintended relaxation of the throat
the water & goat willow I can see
after-images of old trajectories
a children’s swing on an ash branch
in the bright garden of a house long gone
or the gap in the bushes that overlooked the bay
or the turn off at dusk onto the track
leading down to the cabin
or the headlights dipped to the road
twisting up to Frascati
May 2021
(After Sonja Sekula’s The Voyage)
the rooms keeps changing colour
& turning into consciousness
of multitudes
spiral queues of close relations
choirs of gut bacteria
chanted notes that haven’t faded
vibrant memories of journeys
we thought had ended long ago
a conference of garden peas
swaying in spring netting
nodes attached to rootlets
under the tree at the bend in the road
a wordless song is murmuring
of populated patience
& what we said was
thank you for the terraces of flint
thanks for the cheese merchant’s off-cuts
thank you for the beans that just keep coming
thank you for the disinfected gutter
thanks for the hand-me-down cut-offs
I wanted to be there in the line
how thoroughly the world wears out its presences
its nights & oceans
feasts & prison camps
its fingers interwoven in the rubble
Peter Hughes lives on the northern edge of Snowdonia where he runs Oystercatcher Press. He also teaches, and has been Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. Shearsman published Peter’s Selected Poems alongside a volume entitled ‘An intuition of the particular’: some essays on the poetry of Peter Hughes. His other poetry publications include distinctive versions of Petrarch, Cavalcanti and Leopardi. His most recent book is A Berlin Entrainment (Shearsman).
