Annemarie Austin

Shall We Go on the Shiny?


The boy dragged a big spade behind him
across the sand pockmarked by rain
towards where a high tide had left it
smooth and sodden and reflective.
Over his shoulder he asked the woman
‘Shall we go on the shiny?’

Not her, she said, but she’d watch
how he grew stiltwalker legs there
like a seagull stretched into heron
and any small ordinary dog which
showed instead as a stately hound
such as posed in swagger portraits.

So he strode out alone with his spade
onto the shiny and so she lost him
digging his way into a dazzle that
raised a wall before her soon enough.
And his footprints were swallowed up
just as fast as he made them.


*


Wishes for the Poem as Object


You could make a paper boat
of this poem, if it weren’t
a paper boat already.

You could shape an aeroplane
to fly across the room – look
though, it’s flying now.

I’ll let you turn down the page
and crease it as a dog ear
to start the barking.

You can mark the words and lines
in ink or score a stanza
with your thumbnail –

but the poem’s underpainting will
show its skulls or planets
through any overwriting

and be hung up there on the wall
in the good natural light
from a great window.

You can throw it down
but it will crawl away. You
can carry it to another

country and leave it at the station
to catch the train it fancies
all by itself.

When the poem’s trapped in a burning
building, it will remember
how to float and fly.


*


Table/Field


How round this anecdote is.
How it’s heen rubbed down
until it fits the hand, fits
the lips again, can be held
in the cheek like a sweet.

(Though the boiled sweet held
too long wears the slick off
the skin of the inside cheek.)

It’s currency here. We’re old
and our anecdotes roll about
the table. I’m tired of this
but powerless to interrupt
the ritual game of billiards.

(The metaphors get away
to lodge in the green-baize
pockets just as in a mouth.)

Imagine a plain field where
you’ve been lying. You sit up
to see the pleasing levelness
and the gates in four hedges
that offer a choice of routes.

(We could be old that way.
We could choose an appealing gate
and open it and go through.)


*


The Place of Stations

      …before the railways were built, what took
      the place of stations in our dreams?


The way to go away
has all sorts of wriggles in it –
of the too-broad shoulders
through the transom window
on that back door

or shoulders again, shaking off
a hand that would detain
them, and the toss of the head
demonstrating I don’t care.

God had begun to do it
in the fresco in Rome’s San Clemente,
his lower arm extruding
from the rainbow-edged disc of heaven,
the sleeve of a white robe
tossed back from his hand.

And it might have been such an escape
when monks of Maiden Bradley
laid hold on God a second, to be left
as he wriggled away
with the part of his coat they claimed
to possess in their clutches.

Those interfaces did to take the place
of stations. Dreamt pieces
of God went in and out of them
leaving brief traces.

Meanwhile when jumper fibres
remain for clues
on the frame of a transom window
I don’t care,
being altogether gone this time.

 

    11     Shall We Go on the Shiny?
    12     Nail File
    13     Anything with Beak or Bill
    14     Fruit
    15     Slow and After
    16     Dances
    17     Anything with Paws Before Its Eyes
    18     Pincer
    19     Form
    21     Problem
    25     Polly Vaughan – Variations
    27     The Unidentified
    29     Razzle-dazzle
    31     Botafumeiro
    32     Camino
    33     True Vessel
    34     Which Conceals the Location of Waterholes
    35     Hole
    36     Between the Yews
    37     Marquise
    39     The Unspoken
    40     Latent Levitation
    41     Line Drawing
    42     Tightrope
    43     The Walking Shot
    44     The Misses Booth Photographed by Camille Silvy
    46     The Tour
    47     In Sight
    48     Maybe Oystercatchers
    49     Waterscape
    50     Wishes for the Poem as Object
    52     Table/Field
    53     Godney
    54     Kids Don’t Take Walks
    56     I Go on It and
    61     Grey Area
    62     Like My Pocket
    64     Cut Out
    65     Nijinsky Jumps
    67     It (after Linnaeus)
    68     Lop-sided
    69     Bringing in the Washing
    70     The Place of Stations
 

Annemarie Austin reads eight poems from Shall We Go?: 'Shall We Go on the Shiny?', 'Nail File', 'Form', 'Problem', 'True Vessel', 'Wishes for the Poem as Object', 'Table/Field', and 'The Place of Stations'.