Issue 15: March 2008

Chris McCabe | Lorraine Mariner | Kathryn Maris | Simon Smith | Siriol Troup

SIMON SMITH

Objects of Desire

Sipping tea from a Claes Oldenburg mug
the instinct to go on naming
and gaze with the broken line
lists of outlets to match.

He beams at me, one of the kids
doing colouring-in,
pushes on, through the instant,
moon greasy as a beach ball,
tomatoes fat boxing-gloves –

photos of boxing-gloves fatten tomatoes.

Forward of this point in the luminous
static air, these days whisk past

as I attempt cheer, and the chocolate-fudge
sundaes have taken over the palace.

 

3rd May 2007

At the kitchen window cats’ heads float like balloons.

Spinoza slops over the airwaves, Labour
are expecting a bruising night, some policy decisions
snatched from the damp air, some snarling
traffic from the bottom of the road,

and some slops from the bottom
of the washing-up bowl, the pit of Being,
but nothing clean, nothing sweet
or clean. You wash, I’ll dry.

Surrey and Kent kiss at the garden wall.

By morning the fresh new-born World,
but who sat in my garden c.1890?
Middlemarch the moral experiment – when
to this day we haven’t come across the word Reason.

 

A 172 or a 453

Breathe in a space the shape of an ice cube.

Act I Scene I. Enter:
an inspector flashes a white-gold ring.

Dad wearing a black singlet, one stop
then home, bundled silver Nikés
for the kids, some prefer to stand, those
that sit hoard useless charms, use-value
projected from the top deck, shouted

down indices flap up
and down the Old Kent Road the ‘action’ is, performance
in international and local markets split

dividends, the question begging, and the rude girls
go do da do da do da da da do da do da do

‘Chaucer, he can make you say any think
That Chaucer can talk it up chatting shit.’

 

A Table

Out of the woods and into history. Talk above, discourse below the oak.
Table legs thick as a maid’s, no one day without a conversation above
beeswax polish above a shine.

There once was an oak tree and it told stories. One of those stories is
this table, and lives were framed. My grandfather was a fireman on a
steam locomotive, which disappeared into a tunnel. On the other side of
the hill he was a train-driver, ‘choo, choo’. He smoked like a train, then
he died. This made my mother sad. I didn’t know mummies cried.
Now all the mummies cry.

My grandmother wore a floral apron. While my grandfather stoked his
train, she fed the iron-black coal-fired range. On Mondays she washed
all day, and so hard all the furniture popped out into the garden.

The table occupies the same space, reflects the same light it occupied
and reflected circa 1920 when it was made, not by craftsmen, but by a
machine process to look like it was hand-built.

The table I’m writing on is like a microphone. I’m reeling this off from
the knots and grain of amber wood.

Genuine oak, fake skills.

The table proves the passing of time, and paradoxically, the
synchronicity of time. I’ve just bruised my left hip, challenging the
theory, knocking into its bevelled top, as I slid on to the upright dining
chair, one of four that match, and start a lunch of baked beans on toast
I’d purchased earlier this morning from the supermarket. Now the meal
is spilt, lunch not quite begun and not quite finished.

 

About the Mountain

Up here the farmers drive Toyotas and school the sheep like arguments.

Sons ride mountain bikes hurled through no network up the leeward slope,
Space and Time sparkling yellow spanking new as a recent shower.

The tops a place for conversation.

When behind the next peak the next thought stacked with the rest to a beacon point
In line a pair of buzzards fetch round the bell-shaped summit.

Views to the Irish Sea and its breakers.

And after reading aloud John James’ ‘The Conversation’
I was saving up for a rainy day over the clouds, you noted

“That apple was very nice,” at 637 metres floating above Uwich-mynydd

This twenty-eighth day of September two thousand
And six, the way food can only taste that good

After a three hundred meter ascent traversing the thistle path –

The plastic carrier bag we carried snacks in
(Your apple included, as the batteries were
Not with the rubber torch) ripples like flame

– above harum-scarum slopes, below helter-skelter scree –

Then out of earshot carried off with the booming winds and the signal gone

 

 

Simon Smith's latest collection is Mercury(Salt). He translates Catullus and teaches at London South Bank University.