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I damn your ghost for having presence but no voice,
womanhood but no mense, for sleeping beside me
without a sign of breath, and for being that beautiful
without your customary wisdom – do you believe
I’d have this more than let in the night you left us?
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©Marie Marshall
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Victorians wore jet in mourning,
I affect an irregular pendant
in memory of Veronica; it swings
against my breast bone; it clatters
on my laptop if I get up quickly;
it’s an irritation, but then Veronica
was part irritant, part joy, and – hey!
– it’s the irritation I miss most.
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Oh, Wooden Mary!
I hear her chide, a coffee in each hand,
bought for us to sip in between chat,
those silences, our long, long silences.
I use my lips to feel and feel again
the roughness of that jet;
I’m a child, touching it like so,
I was always Veronica’s child.
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©Marie Marshall
Instead of a new poem today, I’ve decided to share an old one from 2014. Welshday is a project I shelved a few years ago, because I was getting nowhere with it. Basically, it was a kind of 21c mash-up of Joyce’s Ulysses, Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, but all very tongue-in-cheek. It was supposed to trace twenty-four hours of novelist Irvine Welsh wandering through the city of Edinburgh – I got in touch with him, to ask his permission to use him as a character, and he replied to the effect “What the hell, why not!” His companion – his version of Dante’s Virgil – is the drunkard policeman Detective Inspector Rimbaud, whom I imagined voiced by Alex Norton (DCI Matt Burke in the TV series Taggart). Fragments and even long passages of Welshday still exist, and the odd bit which could be a stand-alone poem. This is one of them. It’s a Sestina. Welsh and Rimbaud find themselves in a disreputable pub, where Welsh is cornered by a Russian sailor who claims to be the only survivor of the sinking of the submarine ‘Kursk’ in 2000…
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Old Rimbaud said, “Let’s go and take a glass
of whiskey in a jostling pub I know.”
I, like a sodding numpty, dogged his steps,
And tracked him to a clapped-out, frowsy dive,
Where half the clientele were missing ears –
the other half were shouting to be heard!
We’d been there half an hour when I heard
a Russian sailor tap the falling glass;
he grabbed my sleeve, said “This is for your ears
alone, no other bugger has to know.
I heard my skipper calling dive-dive-dive,
as I slid down the conning-tower steps…”
Old Rimbaud, blootered, sunk down on the steps;
the Russian bellowed at me, to be heard.
“The air inside gets hotter when you dive,
the sea is slagged and dark as bottle-glass.
The ghost of every bugger that you know
floats by, and there’s a pounding in your ears!”
His sliding, slootered accent hurt my ears.
I thumbed my belt and slipped some salsa steps;
I said, “Now tell me something I don’t know,
no half-arsed, half-cocked tale already heard,
no shite enigma darkly in a glass,
no bonny buck-and-wing, no duck-and-dive!”
He scowled at me and, miming a crash-dive,
resumed the tale that battered at my ears,
while I, to ease my pain, sucked at my glass.
“Kolesnikov took all the proper steps,
and we went aft – perhaps you might have heard –
but when you’re frigging shark-bait, boy, you know!”
I shut him up, and said, “Here’s what I know –
no fucker made it home from that last dive –
They all asphyxiated, so I heard!”
He laughed, he jeered, I stopped my ringing ears,
and sat down with old Rimbaud on the steps,
to spit at all the demons in my glass.
When ghosts well from a glass you always know,
You’re sitting on the steps of some sad dive,
and though you stop your ears you’ll still have heard!
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©Marie Marshall 2014
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I forget the tight spot on my shoe
when you walk alongside me, but
only until a car pulls up and you
get in; that’s when I make a limp;
off you go, meanwhile I read my
own shoes, measure my steps –
no matter how short a time you’re
in the car, or the fact that you get
out of a car coming in the opposite
direction, or it’s a different car,
maybe red instead of blue, it sucks;
but the pretty sound of your heels
is something I swing my feet to;
sometimes we all wish you’d take
away your heels, and the warmth
your arse leaves on the car seat,
get a bike, so you’d freewheel, or
climb the hills, joie en danseuse.
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©Marie Marshall, by special request. Read the rest of this entry »
An asemic offering from Johannes S.H. Berg.
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The excitement
of a palimpsest
but with a deeper
mystery; I read it
while dreaming;
I impart it while
the sun bleaches
the woken world
100 microphones
hidden in a grey
hillside, mark and
record and offer
for interpretation
each stroke, each
waymark, black
or blood, blood.
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©Marie Marshall
An exploration of the shops that stocked
suddenly old things, guitars, game consoles,
and our heads bumped as we closed in on
the window to cut out reflections; she said
my body scent was like biscuits; and I didn’t
say that when her hair was wet it smelled like
the wind through my nan’s vegetable garden,
but I guess that meant we were comfortable
with it all; she fessed to loving war games
as we saw one boxed, the thump of her heart
under her sweater – I told her I’d check –
at the approach of the miniature enemy;
there should be space made in anyone’s life
for times like this, intimate but not touching,
a conversation about nothing but loaded
with philosophy, a little rain on your neck
to laugh at, and the brush of your knuckles
against her knuckles, not wed but blessed,
finding a coin on the flags – joy – and an
opportunity to drop it in a collecting box,
or in a beggar’s Subway cup; road gold,
a nugget; a slow-breathing morning bustles
into a busy noon, more exploration, this time
the world-map in a coffee cup, she grinning,
the soul of the city she is, moving its pulse
with word, each, yes, my living moment.
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©Marie Marshall
follow the witch, me on a Cayuse, she on a paint, through this field of saguaro without precedent, not a field though, more a forest, a city that presses us in so that we twist and turn on our restive ponies, spines and prickles catching our deep moccasin boots and our chaps, our way a series of zigs and zags; somewhere beyond this monster shade there are mountains, I must believe because I can’t see, I can only glimpse, before each sharp turn, the witch, and I’m conscious of the inverted triangle the line of her broad shoulders makes with the route to her saddle, the hexagon of her pony’s hindquarters and the further hexagon stamped in brown, though I can only see one third; we have left magic and machines behind, she is humming a single note, the regularity of my pony’s tread makes words cycle in my head that I hiss through my teeth in a kind of tune; I search to make them rhyme; my digital watch has stopped; my digital watch gave up the spirit some time ago, but as time is liquid its blank screen seems to be locked in secret, internal argument; I ask how silence can have a rhythm
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©Marie Marshall
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a worn overcoat
hangs on the back of the door
– I say time to go
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©Marie Marshall
Maybe this has to do with proximity
– I’m a hill away and you could see
me if it wasn’t for the trees – but I’ve
a little of the sea in these eyes today;
don’t laugh, don’t curl your lip, for
if this water rises it’ll reshape all of
your stone and your iron; there’ll be
a blow from the horizon (the horizon
or thereabouts) that’ll ripple it, and
I’ll sleeve into a suit of lights, brace,
arch my back, and be counted: one,
no stronger number is, exists, even
can exist, stand it wherever you will.
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the day fire slanting
makes raw gold of the city
– the water steeling
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©Marie Marshall
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What’s new is also old, the world is a button that can’t be pushed, the sky in the firth has occasionally blinked in the train’s blind windows as it crosses the bridge; apart from that, there is a small sound to be heard, but it has only just been heard, no matter if it had always been there.
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a dove mourns
and a grey morning
deals the town
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©Marie Marshall
