Poem - You are heavy in her

You are heavy in her

Then with surprising agility she is a boxing hare

in retreat from you, her ghostly buck, conjured,

trying again to land a husband's blow.

‘His fists’, she pleads, ‘the bastard is back

in the room!’ As if you would upend chairs, vaporise

the remains of her life with oxy-acetylene eyes.

You, shipwright, who pounded her to pieces,

a fist of wages, kids. A blistering sulfurous arc

of marriage still burning, and you dead.

I sooth and set her drifting, distracted.

This is how she is with the tides of her days.

Then my voice, echo of yours, snaps her

to the grid anew, steals her away to years ago,

younger still. Again I am erased. She explains

waiting for your Fairey Albacore engine over

Kentish fields, follows every thudded detail

of your touchdown. Relieved, her eyes seethe,

with the seeds of interaction.  My arms form you 

around her, she squeezes. Her slug lips

spoon, lie together. Iron belief in the flow

of recollection with no end and no end.

James Bullion 28th March 2013

 

Poem - There had been a man in this bath

There had been a man in this bath

It measured the volume of you when you were gone,

red smears above red smears, broad water lines

like rock and crystal strata,

what came before and after. The picture

caught a calm pool where before there was

the spider of your four limbs flailing out, four carers arms

pushed in searching for control in the maelstrom of

water as if all we felt we needed was a stillness and

not a chaotic sprawl of a situation, clarifying, defining

creating actors, witnesses, narrators, disbelievers. 

I watched your spasms building shaking you free of your core. 

And the water out of control, elusive, lying to us.

I wanted to spring you from this calamity, not record

your curious black eyes darting at every shocking new

crush, your bashed frame twisted, twisted more,

knotted you, split you eventually snapping your power,

a shower of red sparks stained the white of your eyes.

Somewhere deep a thud in the pit of your stomach, 

a dropped weight opened emergency doors, emitted 

your red-brown juices into the foamy water from which you tried

to rise but then bombed when your heart finally gave out

and so did ours, in part.  We lifted you we raised you up

gargantuan wet dead spider of a man on to the rubber sheet. 

The two of us, professionally, spoke, of how

we would hold your absence and recall the clicks and suck, 

the tick of your mouth. The rhythm of your to and fro.

We washed you, more carefully than I would have thought,

and you were taken. Left, I took photographs I wrote

evidence. Now you are back there in the crumbling shale 

remains of the bath, in the thin layers of fissile memory. 

Your spring of life, rasp of your breath, breeze of your voice; 

your shy softways glance of eyes. 

James Bullion 28th March 2013

Poem - Pulse of a Stone

Pulse of a stone

We took our home with us those weeks, packing up and moving on each few days, the children falling from their beds if we were not careful and tied them down. I drove like crazy through our old south coast haunts.

So I thought I had something to say about all this; the trip, returning to bury your grandmother, the state of our marriage, myself as a boy, details of the Tracey Emin show (though of the latter I tell people that I do).

The children collected fossils, prised them out. When we had agreed to give them small knives I cannot recollect. The care they must have taken. Ammonites they found. I do not recall walking away, and cannot understand how I wandered so far.

I saw a stone in the toss and turn of a shallow pool. It spun and pulsed, red then grey, held in place by forces. I wondered about them, gravity, friction, energy, (what are they?) The sea leaving returned in the act of going. My feet steadily sinking.

James Bullion March 2013

Poem - Repose

Repose

The fire crouched and died at the kicking of our feet.

We shook our matter, and freed from dust, took the 

Bizerte road between the deserted farms, their shot-

through barns putting us in shade, in sun, in shade.

At the coming of the convoy we wove into the wheat 

field and hid in its sway, kneeling to the crop, hands 

and feet rooted to the ordered humpy soil.

When the engines past we reformed the line. Above

planes banked and gyred tethered to the fingers of

radio men on the ground.

Our boy counted each flash and boom and there, 

there tracing another column of smoke, practising

the streak of fatherhood that you gave to him.

A rustle built to a rage of weather among the wheat 

heads and pulled my eye back to see where in just a 

fraction of time the whole field

convulsed to conjure the path of a lone runner 

dodging and bobbing to escape us, jumping ridges

in the dip and slope of the tended earth.

You disappeared as the air shattered amongst us, 

putting us to another repose, fierce fires, an erasure 

to the white of us.

Once you took us to cooled restaurants, where I had 

mint ice, offered to my lips, you pistachio and our boy 

a mixture of the two.

Poem - Hollow

Hollow

Metal rests in my mouth

Blood lingers in my eye

I thirst

She is reassurance personified

Left handed people like us she

Jots, we are taking over the world

Low weak sun draining the blue,

yellowing the green of trees.

To myself I notice the grey colour

of her tunic, her vinyl black hair

with uneven sprays of light strands

my naked feet, my naked, naked feet.

Oil blue rooks lawn, have chatter beaks

Uzi feet clutching ground, ready.

Who saw copters that tore into Vietnam,

lifting to the air, with menace.

She pushes the needle beyond the vein.

Reacts. Calls a colleague for a look.

I apologise for my frozen ungiving

absurd arm, now two of them

are tapping, more senior tunic

explaining vacuums, stickiness

of blood, water, bruising. Love

comes to mind, everything for the last line.

James Bullion version 4 5/2/13