Issue 5: Nathan Thompson
birthing partners
you begin to be conventional
‘hold my hand’
chaos is not so much foreign
as not to understand
so stop jumping
it’ll come we’ll all feel natural
if we do this right
High above London
love and all its particulars
new ones were founded on
speculative ventures
a gravedigger donned a surplice
to read “the cool of an afternoon shaded
apple-blossom her veins in leaves
quiet my love we should compete in the games”
You enter on the folded edge of a paper aeroplane, the crack in a slab open as if you
have been waiting for years in parchment unavailable to me except through a handful of
scholars. So many numbers appear as lakes and lacunae strings connected to a
balloon over the mountains, the sea, heading towards a decision.
so says the constable at Traitor’s gate
gentleman-thief of bacteria
heading back towards the Thames
absolutely saturated as someone else
himself admits (by way
of a warning) ‘this is garish
and exquisite’ we find compassion delineated
in the creases on exhumation the jumble of
rent sex and pillows offered fresh off the boat
***
your feet face me now as you tumble
who was it that bad scientist
the inveterate juggler who realised he was standing
on nobody’s shoulders and had such a fright
knowing the competition at hand
he let go and things fell out
from nuclei and places they shouldn’t
he was soon a tourist attraction in his own right
‘No cemetery in London can boast so many natural beauties’
and we wonder why ‘you don’t have to be Einstein’
I pull a wire to see what happens. In uniform male and female enquire with concern why it was
necessary to pull the wire. They give me things to fold instead creases in speech
and still the whispers’ attitude is it enough
‘many set sail for earthly competition but not all’
wisdom written on the blades of a television paddle-boat
too big and not deep enough cut/flick/and switch
rain rips out flower after flower
in a startling exhibition of tooth and claw
raising the temperature contracting
fulfilling the scripture ‘only those who labour
hard and compete well’
waiting for jaws to open we
bite empty the angles of silence
and night sidled to by dimmed lamps
it made no difference of course the moth
in the vaults equally confused confessed to seven
historic murders only one of which
had been depicted cinematically
‘Tower Green on 19 May’ we should therefore
compete that we may all be crowned
***
a whistle enters the darkness
surprised by phosphorous
where mechanical escalators are on standby
in a garden of hollyhocks the portrait of a girl
sings
you know
what this is of course it has
been going on a long time
we should at least come close to it
the symphonic a trademark
appeal for loneliness
Why is everybody standing around in surplices? Why the jump-cuts and flowers, long
teeth locked in longer faces piercing your own eyes when she smiles? We should not
forget today of all days when it comes to naming how the entrance was rolled away
leaving only a stone.
what happens
will leak into the soil and contaminate
nearby water supplies you recall the earliest
pagan ceremonies for example the bloody-minded stoicism
that had seen Londoners through the black death’s
one old lady from the East End who shook her fist at the heavens
declaring that she had survived the Luftwaffe
and would decide when it was time for her to go
but we arrive
accompanied by letters cards and candles
replicated up and down the land
many watch on giant screens
which read most conventionally
there will be a spectacle for all to see
a circulation of blank pages
pushed under every door loving today only
none of it at all little stories or white lies pictures taken as it happens
[Sources: The Letter of 2 Clement (Trans. Bart D. Ehrman) and Necropolis: London and its Dead by Catherine Arnold.]
Nathan Thompson lives in Jersey but won't soon. His most recent collections are A Haunting, a sequence of lipogrammatic sonnets, from Gratton Street Irregulars and Holes in the Map from Oystercatcher Press. The Arboretum Towards the Beginning was published by Shearsman Books in 2008.
