Issue 14: February 2007

Matthew Caley| Tim Cumming | Valeria Melchioretto | Kathryn Simmonds | Mark Waldron | Tamar Yoseloff

MATTHEW CALEY

The Ballad of Bay Mare

Apparently, what if Buckminster Fuller designed
a Geodesic-dome for Santa Fe
seaward of where his shrimp-boat, bobbing in the bay
was tethered by its single, fraying rope?
What if I came ashore to scout the freckled bluff,
its plunge-line of loose-footed scree
falling to a bed of scrim and buddleia
where the lone, lean, fine bay-mare was rollicking?

I careered around that corner, purblind and sun-screened
smack-dab into The King Of Spain's daughter, her eyes like anti-freeze.
For her stolid courtiers to tell me fate is a lousy lay.

Hey, eastward the sea and a light-struck skiff
are lapping against each other, insistently—
but the distance remains the distance from here to there, bay-mare.

 

Gifts

1] Jimmy The Greek

Apparently, legend has it the Greeks were want to woo trees
having done, completely done, with fickle woman,
they took up with some spruce or birch,
stripping the bark from slender, off-white shoulders.
Trees, see, stood their ground
weren't loose or left you in the lurch,

you could nestle in the fork, encircle the slim waist,
while the sapling took sun-spangles into her arms.
They coveted nothing racier
than acacia or weeping willow
bending to water. Only dryads got them hard.
See, one minute I'm palming him a shrink-wrapped eighth of dope

by Cafe Pushkar or The Recreation Centre,
next thing, see, he's eloped with this silver birch.

2] Revisiting the Worm

Apparently, I'd downed the very last gulp of Mescal,
swallowing whole the pitiable comma
of worm, then entered a golden realm
—part-Mexican Day of the Dead, part coma—
where the worm began to dream
me as an inebriated Consul

going down on some Dark Consuela of the Cabbala
her iron-ribbed stomach-muscles, the trail of coal-dark down
that led from her navel in a fine, inviting trickle
to collect in a little tombola where a black swan
with six cygnets following, led me below the water,
below, even, the earth below the water

beyond the stretch of any dilapidated pier in Dolortown or Brixton.
I tried to articulate my speech-bubbles. What came out was soil.

3] The Gift

Apparently, Percy Bysshe Shelley
lost all his children eventually,
sacrificed to wanderlust or craft.
He left barely visible mounds all the way across Europe
like cairns, but marking troughs, not peaks.
Wherever he travelled followed faults and rifts.

From here, he could see the hazy, flattened landmass
of The Meridian beyond— through her eyes: almond-opal
as they were, as that birch might be her Doppler.
Shelley copped it for lack
of an available life-raft, for lack of a far-flung guide-rope,
then drowned in sand like Ozymandias.

He knew that gifts
were afflictions. Afflictions, gifts.

 

Chinatown Dessert Spoon

'Apparently, only English rain could slant like this,' said Miss Li Po, 'like grained rice
half-sleet, half-hail,
or the bamboo-curtain we part to broach this place - of all venues -
scouring the courses for half a quail

stuffed with apricots. Later, your already oval face
beneath its square-cut fringe, ballooned like liquid mercury in the dessert-spoon.
                                         'The bill!'
                                         you said, half-heartedly, still surveying the menu
with as much steely will

as Ezra Pound might once have surveyed a Fennollosa m.s
for that line about the 'twirling moustaches', that line about the 'swallow's tail'.

Matthew Caley's debut collection Thirst (Slow Dancer, 1999) was nominated for The Forward Prize For Best First Collection. He's been commended, 3rd and 2nd in the National Poetry Competition in recent years. His second collection is The Scene Of My Former Triumph (Wrecking Ball, 2005).