Issue 5: December 2003

Jonathan Asser | Hamish Ironside | Sally Read | Matthew Welton

MATTHEW WELTON

The fundament of wonderment

She said her name was little jones
and bended back her finger-bones

and sang a song in minor thirds.
She spilled a smile and spoke her words.

*

Up here the river turns its boats.
She brings out books of pencil-notes,

her letters from, her letters to,
her clarkesville park, her london zoo.

*

And, in the wind and where she walks
above the blue nasturtium stalks

at London zoo, the smells of apes
are like the smells of table-grapes.

*

The mice and monkeys tell the trees
the wind will end, the worlds will freeze.

She moves herself beyond the grass
the blue boats pass. The blue boats pass.

The wonderment of fundement

Early in spring the weather hasn't changed.
The concert-room is peppishness unhinged.

Tonight the lady pianist who plays
con fuoco hardly hears her own applause.

*

A Mr Macaroni stops his Ford
two streets away and lets the engine flood,

the radio just loud enough to hear,
one crate of pippin-apples, one of beer.

*

She makes her music, loosening her hands.
The moment holds. But if the evening ends,

the coffee-place will crowd, and trains will leave,
and fields absorb what light the moon might give.

*

These city birds among these city trees
sing slow above this greyness in the grass,

and Mr Macaroni pours his beer
and rattles apples up against his ear.

From The book of Matthew

  Class Five: Volition: the exercise of the will

    Division one: Individual volition

Section 2: Prospective volition

The dogs beyond the orange-trees
take up the smell
of coffee-grounds and laundered shirts

and pilchards and milk
that follows through
the willows where the bean-vines

in the sun stifle a little
and the shadows unsettle.
The worn, late-morning light

arriving above the brackens and
brambles seems sharpest
where the rabble-plants

bundle out over the lawns,
honeying like sugar
in the wider, realer air.

Desperately gully-bugs
stumble in the heat; table-paper
clouds gather low in the sky.

And it is the wind — burrowing down
like something in the mind,
and carrying with it this oaky

kind of smell — that makes the mood
that makes the day
feel volitional or teleological,

deliberate or intent. Below the trees
the shadow puddles out.
Cleanly the light passes. Cleanly

the wind slackens off into the morning.
The sound of insects
carries cautiously into the air.

Taken from The Book of Matthew (Carcanet, 2003)