Issue 12: June 2006

Julia Bird | Jane Holland | Gregory Leadbetter | Andrew O'Donnell | Adam O'Riordan | Camellia Stafford

JULIA BIRD

Your Grandfather Would Have Wanted You to Have This

... so raise a glass of the whisky that was sunk
that this bottled boat could draw a schoonerful
of model sea, to the man who modelled it:
who teased each wave from putty and oil paint
through the keyhole of the bottleneck, who spent
all winter in the dry-dock of the dining room
ship-building a spillikin keel with hair-pin ribs,
who flocked the bottle's concave glass
with flake-of-salt-sized gulls, whose fingers
were made delicate by the tweezers and the button-hooks
it took to tat the rigging, gather-stitch the sails.

No champagne smashed at this ship's launch
but in the cross-trees of its mizzen mast
see, perched, the balsa wood ship's boy
with his minute jeroboam? In that bottle,
your grandpa said, the smallest tot of sea.
On that sea, a fleet.

 

The Animals Went in Two by Two

The finch is hardly even winged
in the dogfight with its double-glazing twin
and would — with a moment's fluster on the deck —
flight-check itself and take back off
to circle the garden, or skip the surface
of the pond as if both duck and drake.

Instead, a boy is launched from indoors
who fishes the bird up and press-gangs it,
with biscuits and a tot of water in a lid,
into a shoebox which he beaches on a shelf
above his bed and puts on watch
a crocodile of plastic dinosaurs.

He cannot know why the bird won't eat.
All we can do is urge his mother in
to raise the blinds and flood the room with light,
to say — as mothers should —
Why don't you two play outside?
Such a shame to waste this sun.

 

From Cramond Beach

i

This seascape is an exercise in shades of blue:
sky, pure pigment, airbrushed onto backlit glass,
its finish flawless, high. And the sea, trying to do what the sky tells it to,
makes each wave a version or a cromalin — blue-green a near miss,
grey-blue a rough guess — collaged at the outline of the shore.
Shingle on the beach is Wedgwood. It's fine-ground sherry bottle,
swimming pool tiles, and it's stamped with skip-step footprints,
a hallmark the length of this transmuted golden mile.

ii

Here on the best beach —
made of so much
smashed up mussel shell
the dunes are streaked with blue.
My castles turn out
with that Square Mile, city glitter —
1,000 windows bouncing light.
Weather is lovely.
The weather here is lovely.

Julia Bird grew up in The Cotswolds. She works for The Poetry School in London and as a freelance literature promoter.