Issue 18: John Goodby

from THE NO BREATH

   10

This is the moment when

The iridescent bubbles stop everything

I climb the opportunity of the cupola

The thirsty hour the long walk up

Imagine            Forget

To visit me there

   Rive

The merchandise is waiting

By the edge of the water,

Blue and brown verticals of wood

Murmuring the motor in its mud.

   Walling

Into a hole with a stick

At a pace to be still

Of thyme and oregano

Till the stars kick up

Disappear on a mere

Like the little streets

Humbled with the deeps

There, from the chief

Square you enter suddenly

The donkey stares into

   He

The glazed grief manifest

Hocks their tiny weights

Or the clay lame with ebony

Reeking of legs clasped round

Invisible presences

Or pale to run with like

Memories he wants to tame

The yellow grass of the plain

Or galloping tenderness

Bearing down a stone

Or two in the deep shade

The coal eyes of the trees.

John Goodby lectures at the University of Swansea. He is the author of The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (2013), and edited the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (2014). Mine arch never marble (Argotist Online) and The No Breath (Red Ceilings Press) are forthcoming in 2017, as is the anthology The Edge of Necessary: Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966-2016 (Aquifer Press, with Lyndon Davies).

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