Issue 15: March 2008

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

SIRIOL TROUP

Oral

We used to talk and smoke and drink cheap brandy
deep into the night – free love and ban the bomb,
democracy and truth, the pity war distils.
Now, if we talk at all, we talk about our teeth:
bridgework and root canals, gold crowns, the plaque
that blights those cliffs that once were white,
our world contracted to a landscape of decay,
corrupt enamel, old certainties that crumble
when we suck on things we used to chew or bite.
Our gums still bleed at the prick of the drill
but Lidocaine has left our lips so numb
we scarcely notice every nerve is wrecked
and that what issues from our mouths is not
the wind of change, but palls of gassy breath.

 

Motorway Bridge

This green bridge spanning the twisted scar of the road
is a trick of the mind, an image
of primeval forest, Elysian fields, a sigh for higher
moral ground. Angelic flyover, perhaps?
– rather, a walkway from judgement hall
to execution place, lashed across the void
like something out of Indiana Jones.
A feat of engineering, man-made but natural,
wearing its leaves and umbrage like Great Birnam Wood;
a viaduct for deer, mice, ants, the shy hedgehog, the blind mole,
for all the animals that creep and crawl but have no wings,
so they can cross, and cross again,
deluded into thinking their fragmented space
is one big happy joined-up world
whose heavy metal roar is just a background noise
we’re all immune to now, even that curious roebuck parting
the leaves to watch the dragons smoking down below.

 

Floe

Our tracks once told us where we were.
We’d crack the whip and grip
the horse’s flanks, certain we’d reach
the lake in time to catch the boat
to take us to the other side.

Now, mile after mile, snow scrolls
into the night. The world’s reduced
to white-out: heartbeats and hoofprints,
a jangle of frost on iron, skeins
of snowgeese cutting up the sky.

We ride and ride – sweat pours,
the road goes on and on and on.
When we stop at the first lights
to ask a local girl how far
there’s still to go, she stares

as if we’ve missed the plot,
then points to the black water just
behind. ‘Didn’t you come by boat?’
We turn towards the frozen sheet
that bore our weight across

without our knowledge,
and those cold fingers we now see
lurking beneath the rime
rise up to seize our reins
and smash our own thin ice.

 

Faun

When he comes to the edge to drink
you recognize his angular grace –
slim hips, hair quiffed into horns,
thumb cocked like a gun.

You know him from disco nights
and back-seat sex,
hot tongue on your pale skin,
that dreamy look that tells you he’s high

on something you’ve never tried:
the power to take on other forms,
to find what remains in him
of the animal or the pagan.

Goatish in hooves and fur,
then suddenly drawing music
from a reed or a bone
as if the world’s a shadow on stone

and all that matters
is the sound of the pipe,
the play of sunlight on water,
the abstract beauty of limbs.

 

Knowledge

She wanted the world –
he closed his eyes to shut it out,
threw her an apple:
Take that!

She bit her lip
and knowledge flowed
like blood.

It tasted good,
she discovered,
saucing his rib.

Siriol Troup's collection, Drowning up the Blue End, is published by Bluechrome.