Issue 8: January 2005

Matthew Caley | Matthew Francis | Kathryn Gray | Daljit Nagra | Tim Wells

KATHRYN GRAY

The King's Head

Now I well know that I am not the first to liken the two:
this beered-up, close air being ancient, having a sacrosanct
and ceremony of light and dark, the font or the missal;
but whatever it may be that leads the cellar, barrels, pricelist
and tap onward in the fear of God, began with you.
So let us now avoid the rush, the Scampi, a filled baguette,
and the rite, near-extinction of the Ploughman's Lunch
across this country's counties. Three is the empty hour:
baskets tinking the bells of glasses and, here, the back-breaker
pew — the only one that will do — where the stained pane
falls in a flush over beer mats, the stick and scuff of table.
Are we two not, in fact, the true devout, bearing as we do
our clammy witness to the dartboard's years of patient
stigmata, our pores breaking out in sympathy for its cork?
What need have we of an iconography? If so, what better
than these as its sum: the welling tear of a Vodka optic,
those Marys in relief behind the bar, their bored, open faces,
readied hands, our proof of a caritas, if any, in this world?
I well know I am not the first to weigh up an almost parity;
was it not yourself who once intoned This place is a church:
I, its humble minister, you, my sorry flock? And so let us be
seated to take in what, to some, could pass as the after-life,
though we have declared this a personal genesis —
the slow business of these hours, oh pastor, father, publican —
before an evening or a morning have found their division,
before the waters are folded back, an earth and a quease
return to haunt and hold us. Here, you could walk from
a stink of the Gents, rearranging yourself like the plausibly
risen again, and I would take it on faith: the cigarette-cough
laugh hacking over my concern and question, the stubbed-out
break, like your place, where there settles this draught.

The Wardrobe

This wood is not about the old wives and the oak
or the ash that separates a summer from a soak.

And that afternoon when a sky turned dark,
though it might have been the Ark

itself as twelve men in Sunday drink shouldered it
from the house of the last widow left

on Beaufort Hill, this is not about the front step,
the angle, lift and give, the driving curses of their stoops;

not even how, at a loss, they took at it with the axe
and nailed it by bits back; every loving cuff and coax.

Or how for years the doors would fall open,
as if it was — loosely speaking — a lopsided heaven;

how it proved by the burning it was only wood,
as much this felled as when it stood.

And last, with every man now decades gone,
singing, I push them down the Taff to Avalon,

the river become rain or a spread of that fire.
No. These are the stories. This was the weather.

The Storm

after Ingeborg Bachmann

What to say of that evening, except there was a path
we walked, which made a stunted avenue of the bushes,
and the sky above us, a meticulous traffic, gathered up
until it seemed huddled to the folds of those same roses.

What, but footfalls ahead; the argument swithering air
to a black weather, while leaves caught the light's edge
like razors, to hold and shake the wake of a thunderclap,
by which we counted out the seconds to this distance.

All poems from The Never-Never (Seren, 2004), shortlisted for the Forward Prize (Best First Collection) 2004 and the T.S. Eliot Prize 2004.