Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 5, Number 2. November 2022. ISSN: 2581-7094
Ghost nets
World turns its wheel, first spring
again: season of conception.
Magpies marble morning, javelin
cyclists under trees. Osprey
mantles estuary, river’s shift is
flecked with prey, Perth’s
asymmetric towers are cartoon stark
against blunt blue. A Saturday
regatta on the Swan, a wedding
shoot despite the wind, bride
and groom are ‘liked’ for smiles
that will outlast their marriage.
Out on the edge of west I wait, the
ocean pearling round my feet,
imagine you vibrating with the
voices of that mighty fang of land
that inks this ocean’s name, your
city’s colours, clamour, heat.
I would tell you of ‘my’ city, but
its cadence isn’t mine, comes from
mineral and wetland, skirl of water
serpent tail, from song and stamp
of feet and greeting, blood of
birth and battle, from a secret weeping.
I can only throw these lines to
you, attached to deserts, to a million stories,
coastline broken from Gondwana,
ancientness you’ll understand.
When they reach your shores their
syntax will be splintered, saline,
reading them will not unknot them,
nor salvage what has slipped
the mesh. Think of them as ghost
nets trawling through the tide’s
acoustic rumour: briefly full of
words and songs that echo indigo.
London
Sunrise furs you gold and ermine,
tips the Bailey scales
with gilt, fires your churches into
angelus and matins,
Ethelberga, Anne and Agnes, Botolph,
Clement, Giles.
Morning quenches watchmen’s
lanterns, Lyme Street,
Hoare’s Yard, Mincing Lane. Smears
its mist above
the plague pits: Houndsditch, Pest
Field, Aldgate East.
At this hour, you own the Thames,
your ribcage
Southwark, Blackfriars Bridge.
Walbrook Wharf
is your intestine; lungs Portsoken,
Seething Lane.
Sleeping lion, you are this city,
when you roar you wake
the dead. Where you shit the
markets ripen, where you rut,
the clergy shake. Rich and poor
feed from your kills, we’re
tapeworm in your guts. Or we hitch
our fortunes, flea-like,
to the fibres of your hide. For you
are golden fur this morning:
Bank of England, debtors’ prison,
Bedlam, Bow, Cheapside.
Open Letter To My Dear City: a response
Your letter makes me lonely, makes
me want to be ‘dear city’. To read my
many names as archive of the lives you track from street to street, till you
hold me like your body’s laughter, closer than the crosshatch of my shadowed
alleys. Limb on limb, a map to every longing. You will find me younger yet I’m
just as scarred; sparer than the metaphors you’re used to. Tell me to engulf
you: make me open up my dead ends and my prisons and my temples. I’ll draw you
to the dark allotments, scrape lacquer from your lines. Offer words to our new
language, sweetness mixed with poison. Everything your letter says you love.