NEIL ROLLINSON

Constellations

Beyond the house, where the woods
dwindle to a few stray trees, my father
walks on the lake with a hammer.

He's never seen so many stars,
and wonders why
with all that light in the sky

it doesn't cast a single shadow.
He takes a few blows at the ice, and drops
a sackful of bricks

and kittens into the hole, listens
a moment to the stillness of deep winter,
the hugeness of the sky, the bubbles of warm

oxygen breaking under his feet,
like the fizz in a lemonade; the creaking
of ice as it settles itself.

His father's at home, coaxing voices
out of a crystal set, a concert from London.
Ghosts in a stone.

My father doesn't like that, he prefers
the magic of landscapes, of icicles
growing like fangs from the gutters of houses,

the map of the constellations. He turns on the bank
and looks at the sky. Orion rising over Bradford,
Cassiopeia's bold W, asking Who, What, When

and Why? And down in the lake, the sudden
star-burst of four kittens under a lid of ice,
heading to the four corners of nowhere.

French

Twenty minutes was all we'd manage
of compound tenses and conjugated verbs
before she'd lead me down the corridor
into her scented room, her joss-sticks,
and her threadbare Tubular Bells, for extra-
curricular activities beneath a poster of
The Grateful Dead. I remember the cool
expanse of her bed, her smell in the sheets,
her mouth, her short cropped hair,
and the taste of her skin when she came
to me, her nipples harder than stones.
I remember being pinned to the mattress
wondering if every woman was just like this,
amazing that anything could feel so good;
those miniscule breasts, the slope of her belly,
her cunt, so strange it made me tremble
just touching it. I couldn't get enough of that.
She was the girl from another world, everything
I'd ever dreamed of, the way she loved it
from behind, wore nothing but Dr Marten's
on that big white bed — that turned me on —
everything about her did: the stud in her tongue,
her voice, the way she came — in French:
baise-moi, baise-moi. And afterwards her
taking the fee my folks could ill afford
for this private tuition, that was a turn-on too:
paying her week after week for the lessons.

From Spanish Fly (Cape, 2001)

Also available from Amazon.co.uk:

A Spillage of Mercury (Cape, 1996)

Neil Rollinson's second collection, 'Spanish Fly', follows on from A 'Spillage of Mercury' to confirm him as one of the most exciting, vibrant and sexy poets of his generation. 'Constellations' won the 1997 National Poetry Competition.

Praise for 'A Spillage of Mercury':

"Very few poets hit the ground like this. Move over, Catullus and Villon."
Tibor Fischer

"'A Spillage of Mercury' caused ripples with its delight in bodily fluids. But what crackles off his pages is not obscenity but delight in language, in revelatory ways of seeing the world. Amused, rueful, gentle poems, profound and humane under their sexy physicality."
Ruth Padel

Reprinted with permission of the author

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