1 poem
Set piece with mackerel and seal
A little bit of hush please, as we help this
gentleman from his bright doublet. To do it well,
hook one thumb into the mouth and pull
revealing the red ruff. They go so quick like that,
as if something came unfastened or let drop
its stocking and stepped out. A flutter, as of silk,
then all the pewter dulling into blues
and deeper blues and greys and indigos.
And light, which has no business with the dead,
trips off to count its costume jewels instead.
The dark is moving in the deeper dark
below the swell, and sometimes, it raises its head
or the skin-on-skull that passes for a head.
Then he blows his ballast, or just lolls, gross
doyen of this house. Shows who’s boss.
And what ignites the burner in his brain
is that old flirt, the glint of sun on scale.
Good, perhaps, to be this. To be nothing
but urge and sate and swell. When all there is
to know of light is winks and promises.
Someone is fishing from the morning rocks
on a telescopic pole. With knots and nylon.
He knows there is this fractious glitterball
turning with the tide, and wants answers
to his stilted little rig of luck and will.
He wants to be all nerve, just one nerve,
running up the carbon fibre, down the line,
to where the lures twitch. To cast the spell
and then fall hopeless under it. Till all he knows
of joy looks like a bar of beaten light.
Trickier, to be this. To have this flair
for theatre. For knots and complications.
To learn, again and again, how the diva
might anyhow just flounce off in her sequins.
Not tonight, perhaps. But one day soon.
Then all the houselights dimming into blues
and deeper blues among the shadowed stalls.
And then just empty rows, and empty seats,
and nothing more and no one moving there
but the lean old usher pulling down the shutters.
Abigail Parry's first collection, Jinx, is published by Bloodaxe.