FOUR POEMS

Not Olga 

A canvas bawled scarlet – 

one eye heard it. Flesh 

a grey-mauve coil, clean 

on its yellow chair. Skin 

tinged violet. Pea green. 

Exquisite slug! Best done 

in oils – not characterised. 

I get through 

One drawback of loneliness – you can notice yourself too much 

carrying this self around between cupped hands like something 

fragile in need of careful positioning, although you’d not meant 

to become a thing to yourself, far less a delicate fetish. Yet once 

you’ve ferried your own cloistered burden outdoors, any breeze 

will undo it, so by then you’re no longer a well-wrapped patted 

ball but are genially uncoiled on the air, dispersed as filaments 

apt to take a wandering interest in everything, bar their source. 

Both working and living alone, I might wait days for a sighting 

of anyone familiar; still, hours may slip by with reassuring ease 

as my violin’s sobbing swings into a chirped pizzicato. Bookish 

daffs aside, a bright solitude beams gaiety upon my inward eye 

but it can lurch to self-upbraiding: what eager emptiness made 

me incapable of holding onto someone else’s affections? Don’t 

rush to answer. My DIY tussles allow me an alibi: being of use. 

So what if my plastering’s done in a gape of no human contact. 

Faced by the freshly polished table, set for one, I’ll quaver that 

‘we’re born alone, we die alone’, but am not heartened by this 

saw. Too laboured, these efforts to handle seclusion gracefully. 

But then, it’d be harder to not be alone – or at least, so I fancy, 

rehashing this half-convinced solace: ‘I shouldn’t much like to 

be visible to someone else all the time, not that I do anything so 

wicked in private – sadly’. Being solo means calculating; might 

I tot up enough friends to see each one per week, over the year 

but how many of those might come round less, or more, often? 

What rainbows of Post-It Notes a hope-stuffed timetable needs.

Why was humanity fabricated as single pinpricks of perception?

Sequestered minds, embodied – a theatrically bad arrangement.

Simpler, kinder, for just one collective to have been engineered

un-individuated – rather than us billions of scrapping creatures.

The plain truth is that given the longed-for company, I’ll love it

but soon get overwhelmed then want to slip off home – and do,

to the joy of flopping alone with a glass that’s riskily comforting.

Unseen, yes, glad of that, I’ll uncurl for an evening’s preparing,

death-sorting through my clothes in heaps, lamenting woollens

where grubs of moths revolved my cashmere pensively between

their jaws, am a cloth snake of a draft-excluder wedged in a gap

my one side warmed, the other nippy (is it late enough now for

this twilight’s vermouth glow?) Cheered as I cheaply am by my

small plant’s lumpy name – an ageratum, button-shaped washy

mauves set on the worktop where rough-ribbed sunflowers lour

over it – no, nothing does turn ‘gratefully’ to catch the sun. Yet

turn it will. I’ll lay me down. Today has just been got through.

And home lamenting bore it

Hose down the bloody lamb.

Shear its woolly skin to the bone.

Penitential rain, cleanse my remembering.

Mop me in blue scrubs.

Mother of mercy, when we were thin!

René Char’s vineyard

Evening rosary of grapes.

The highest bunch bleeds a last glitter.

Brother larch, moss spur, quick harp.

Were a swift to land, it’d rip open.

Friends of picnicking in hailstorms, don’t die off yet.

Got a light, got the time, how far’s the next town?

Pine trunks tighten into beds into hexagons.

‘Please supply a biographical note’

A natal error.

Steadied by pamphlets

and brilliance of the babies.

In leaping joy alone.

Why do some will themselves to stone.

Now is it time for night to fall.

All work subsequently published in Lurex, Picador, 2022.

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