Issue 7: June 2004

Antony Dunn | Cheryl Follon | Susan Grindley | Clare Pollard

ANTONY DUNN

Flea Circus

When the time came we packed up the Big Top,
stowed it in the trunk and drove off the map.

Back in the dark the glass tent came alive:
trapeze and cannon, plunge-pool and high-wire,

everything shaken to a frenzied show.
And though we'd later accuse — come to blows —

we'd never be sure which of our number
left the Top unhooked; by trick or blunder

let our stars seize the chance, make a clean jump
out through the countless non-doors of the trunk.

But fled they were, for sure, when we arrived.
And though we made the best of it, and thrived,

found ourselves skilled in micro-mechanics,
some of us resented living off tricks

and felt in the itch of our bad-feeling
the bite of our great hope's flight, the bleeding,

the drop-by-drop drain of a life gone thin.
The fleas, somehow, still, get under our skin.

Lisdoonvarna

    1942

He'd hook cycle-clips, lucky as horse-shoes,
like a black love-heart in his breast pocket
and — having no bicycle, nor even
the front to dab his tie with petrol — walk.

September; and the fields lying in wait
for the fire through the stubble and the smoke;
the first drub and craic of drums rolling in
from far off — the pulse of the place racing.

He'll not dance, though. He's two left feet, has John;
a worse unbalance in his chest — the weight
of the ghost of a whale lumped in one lung.
Ten years he's been a fish out of water

since his night waist-deep by the dead creature,
his three days and nights sunk in a fever.
Jonah, they call him, the girls who sniff out
a lift home in the closing of a clinch

or read in the boys' braille of cycle-clips
the promise of a cross-bar through the dark.
Spat up on the shore of the lamplight's wash,
he watches the splash and spume of the dance,

an hour or so, then out to the sea-path,
leaving the whispers of deals done drowned out
by a tide the colour of submarines,
and, pocket wishboned, wishes himself out —

all at sea in a whale's gut — then landfall,
a demon, swine-bound, cast back on dry land.

Maria

A little water clears her of this deed.

Her skinny wrists cuffed in her mother's grip,
she is salt-scrubbed in shallow surf, silver
gilts of scales falling from her fingers
with the offal of the four stolen fish,
pinched one by one from her brother's line, live,
and broken in her inquisitive hands.

Cutlery paused, poised, we are witnesses.
Underneath our table a cat marvels
at the clockwork of a cockroach,
winding it in its teeth, setting it off.
In its green wheelbarrow a sheep, meekly,
considers its bindings and its progress.

* * *

Maria is fishing. The vengeful sea
hangs on her wire a shock of octopus.
Black-faced in its fearful rage, alien,
it wears her hugely in its bangling arms;
and the sea-creature and the earth-creature
trap and trade their horror like two mirrors

till her brother unclasps the octopus
and turns it inside-out over his thumb;
and her mother tends her in the water,
scrubbing her into chill shackles that slip,
easy, onto her wrists where sweetening air
and clean water fasten. This fastening,

this ink; a tattoo on water, under skin.

Available from Amazon.co.uk

Flying Fish (Oxford Poets, 2002)
Pilots and Navigators (Oxford Poets, 1999)