Issue 9: March 2005

Ian Duhig | Annie Freud | Mark Granier | Heather Holden | John Stammers | Matthew Sweeney

JOHN STAMMERS

I Don't 'Go Organic' Often, But When I Do

I don't 'go organic' often, but when I do
cash registers explode, shop assistants lurch back
beneath furry earflaps,
        the wild beasts knitted on Iroquois sweaters
                                                            leap up,
their hunters let fall their bows,
        returning, at all fleet, to tented encampments of their tribe
to sit wordlessly
with the Great Spirit.
        Cram up my basket, I say, for I am not all water —
though hydration may form the signal part
of any halfway harmonious regime.
I am told that amaranth binds a higher protein content
than the equivalent weight
        of any goodly-made walrus.
Pass me that cantaloupe, farmed in biotic growing methods
by organo-wonks with expensive recreational habits.
                                                            I wish to pay
largely for it, if you would be so kind,
and desire
little change from a high denomination banknote.
        Only stay, stay your hand there         on its surface
to let my own against the edge of yours, tender, as in a slow wooing.
Fresh we were and wild,
                O yes wild, I say, were we,
 implacable huntress of the free-range legume.
And what does it come to in any sort of natural currency?
        A single meal for two, free of human taint,
the feel of cool, green skin beneath your palm touched along mine,
and a further difficulty — I see that, scourge of the brassicas —
        I do not always know what I am doing.

The Day Flies Off Without Me

The planes bound for all points everywhere
etch lines on my office window. From the top floor
London recedes in all directions, and beyond:
the world with its teeming hearts.

I am still, you move, I am a point of reference on a map;
I am at zero meridian as you consume the longitudes.
The pact we made to read our farewells exactly
at two in the afternoon with you in the air
holds me like a heavy winter coat.

Your unopened letter is in my pocket, beating.

There

I survey the scatter of your flat, the origami paper-ball
pendulous beneath the chandelier.
Giant sequins that are face-down CDs
reflect some acute angle of incidence
of the lightbulb's lugubrious, moody loll,
their leitmotifs rippling the light in grooves:
Lieder, Liebestraum, Love me Tender.
It's like one moment you are not there
and then you are,
as if an assistant has activated an arc lamp for a photo shoot —
whoosh!, woman of weirdy shapes around the house.
Your sculptures are unique forms of sounds in space,
the silhouette of your sobriquets, say:
Rachel, Raquel, Rach', Rachem.
You are as intensely real this instant as an image
on the front cover of The Face.
But who? I don't know you girlie, girl.
Then Rachel everywhere,
Rach', all around in your actual front room —
tint and timbre and oblique, spatial trajectories! —
so that I can see you, really see you, Rach'.

Flower Market Street

The air today is so brilliant you have to breathe it in sunglasses,
the clouds in their short-sleeved cotton shirts
as fresh as the people of Rome
who make their way back to work
after their siesta and shower and who look
like someone has starched and ironed them
and as if something has been arranged.

And perhaps it would have been better, padre mio,
have avoided all that trouble, if you'd stayed there,
learned to really speak the lingo, hadn't had to mangle
those Caruso songs on Sunday mornings,
married the one wife, her eyes like olives.

Instead you practised the ancient drill:
the blinds lowered in daylight,
the fatuous fables of where you've been,
all the flimsy ad hoc'ery of deceit.
You knew the preposterous offset of weekday afternoons
that were your Saturday nights,
the new cufflinks you dare not use,
the birthday cakes you only had one slice of, the whole catastrophe
of stolen temporalities from the gaps of your life.

A certain woman and I stroll your neighbourhood
and she remarks how fitting it is
that she should be the one here with me —
not being who we are, being who we are not —
as we walk your street out of time.
'It seems,' I tell her, 'I have a gift for all this.'

We pass the bedroom window of your mid-life,
the boudoir, the love-nest.
This was the fling that sent you off your own fancy way
in your Italian suits and Agua de Silva —
my shining one, with your daring blend of deception and romance.
I stand here now, stand here then,
as once again you steal out
to come home to kiss goodbye to my childhood.

I say, Go to it, don't let me down,
that I might come to write you this;
and you didn't.

From Stolen Love Behaviour (Picador, 2005)

Also available: Panoramic Lounge-bar (Picador, 2001)