I love when images clash. When an image describes something perfectly but seems to have barrelled in from outside this particular poem, bringing a whole new set of luggage. I love these collisions and moments of discord because they make connections beyond what’s rational. For me, this is at the heart of poetry. I never set out to write a poem knowing where it will end (what would be the point of writing if you did?) It’s through image-making I discover new ways of understanding and articulating what I have been carrying around with me.
Of course, I comb through the initial drafts and move the tangle from my notebook (or my phone’s voice recorder) onto a computer screen. I worry at it and make decisions about what should be grown or cut. If you’re going to ask a reader for their time, something they won’t get back, you should be giving your time too. But I’m not transcribing something I’ve already seen; I’m drafting a communication to myself as well as to a reader.
These poems were written during the disturbing end-years of the 2010s. In ‘Early Winter’ readers may recognise FiveThirtyEight; a blog known for accurate election predictions. The night before the 2016 USA election it predicted Hillary Clinton had a 71% chance of winning. At the time The New York Times predicted an 85% chance of a Clinton win, Huffington Post 98%, Predict Wise 89%, Princeton Election Consortium 99%, Daily Kos 92%. By the time this anthology is published there may be a new president in the White House, but the concerns of these poems are sadly no less pressing. We are still ‘charged with shifting the axis of the earth’.
*
While scrubbing saucepans, gloved hands
sucked and sunk in steamy waters,
I’ve not looked up and caught the blushing tail
of an epiphany through the kitchen window.
Or glanced one floating in the burnished flank
of a toaster. A child next-door is practising scales
on an angry block-nosed recorder.
Small woman. Sensible pebbledash.
Can we not be honest with one another?
Is it really just me who must shove
all the mess in a cupboard
for the whole afternoon
to get nearly anywhere?
Come, take my hand, walk with me while the dam holds.
The downstream path is in festival.
I know a pub where we’ll meet such characters.
It mainly solves its problems
by not being there at all
but under water, coming up
in the smallest surface stiches.
I’m in a four-bed ward
and one of us just died.
They’ve closed the curtains
and sent in chatty students
with packets of digestives
to keep our minds away
from the removal.
So, I decide, that,
down there, is the descendent
of a North American Loon.
Look how it loops
under the white tourist cruiser.
In Alberta, a single pair
could rule a lake
the size of Westminster.
Here, her polka dot coat
is gravy stained with Thames water.
Any second,
she will shoot her call like a flare
and it will hang
over the office workers of Whitehall.
The king, his gold retainers, a school of priests,
the men who can’t remove their helmets
out of doors, and the plush unarmored
trudge a mirror-surfaced beach.
1
Laugh, laugh at the foolish fop-haired
Rollo square-face as he waves his sword,
slashes water, cold stung, face infection-hot
with tears, a mug in ruined boots.
2
The second king has quietness: a loved teacher
waiting for his class to own their error.
Surf nuzzles at his ankles.
This man’s immovable, except a roll of hair
caught in the wind’s chill currents and his eyes
resting in the eye of each advisor
until the sycophant wilts.
3
This last Canute has brought a camera crew.
His open suit and tie flap, the one concession
his women swapping heels for ballet pumps.
When water fills his shoes, it doesn’t matter
he is rich and there’s blankets in the waiting SUV.
He roars the waves will hold
as water’s licking up his trouser legs.
He thinks he’s in a story
and the better story wins.
That truth is just the story
that the audience lets in.
It doesn’t matter if he’s Cnut or Canute,
if we’re in Norfolk or in Neverwhere.
He’s miked up, entertaining
and his wife’s and daughter’s hair
is sprayed as hard as bronze,
the wind, the sea, cannot mar the shot.
The volcano’s in its third trimester,
our soil bulges over elbowing fire.
So fling open the airing cupboard,
let’s dress in the bed sheets:
we’re online posting as soothsayers from Pompeii
searching new ways to say the same dire warnings.
O, the iced deliciousness of being ignored
by everyone, except for anyone we know.
Which is not to say,
we don’t wipe a thin sulphur dust
from our phone-screens as we read.
*
You’ve seen the casts from Herculaneum:
human ice-pops.
We thought we knew them
but X-rayed this spring
we learned ‘The Beggar’
had a young man’s hips
and a bronze buckle
coagulated inside.
*
Filtering is in its infancy.
The next generation of wearables
will allow you to live in a curated city.
You’ll see your friend alone in the street
among a shoal of infectious shadows.
Blackflies thick as showers of rice –
mosquitos pitched their rigs and drilled
a mess of extra knuckles on my hands.
My morning shower was torture,
the lightest drizzle
sprung a hundred clock alarms.
That May in Canada, I was a sack of blood
hauled round for scrums of butchers
with dirty electric knives.
I wore ligatures, red lines across my wrists,
my waist, ankles where I pulled draw-strings
too tight. Nothing was sealed.
I wore a veil, dislocated my sight, I’d slip focus
between the lakeshore and my grill.
I tried sprays with puns: buzz-off,
smidge. I trawled the forums for hacks
(try Goji Berry Skin So Soft). I used Deet
until I didn’t know if the deepening red
was from the open-wounds or chemicals.
I spread on cooling lotion like cream cheese.
Once, I blinked and caught one in my lash.
As I picked it out, the mangled parts still buzzed.
They pocked the surface of the lake like rain
and when the storms did come they didn’t care:
thunder was God tearing open another pack
of biting things to get at me.
Then, at the end of May, they hatched:
a shiny guard, ballista-bodied dragonflies,
helicopter gunships thick as thumbs
and matchstick musketeers in dandy blue.
I’d never thought to google what they ate
until, within a week, they’d cleared the air.
Dun-coloured endangered species of specialist interest;
best found on grungy paths, behind gabardines,
near shoes on school radiators, wet socks at work.
A furred creature, hood-hidden, brolly-blinded, shy.
The invasive species: a fearsome firestorm
of peeled blue sky. Allelopathic leaf-crisper,
river-fading grass-bleacher, ice-cream-smiling
skin-killer, furze-burning-forest-eater, agricide.
See the burn blisters on the ridge of this ear.
See water rationing. See heat edema. See dizziness.
Poured on skin, lighter fluid
burns shallow. My hand in flames
was no worse than a plaster ripped off;
we were more burnt by the sun.
I can’t even remember his name.
He had a newspaper rolled in a torch
burning up too quick
and nowhere to drop it,
so we slammed it in the fridge.
The box sealed. The rubber trim
sucked tight. We couldn’t force it
anymore than we could pull apart
a dinner plate. Not crack a dish
but hold the rims and pull it in two,
everything has its own way to break.
The air was eaten: a dimple
in the cool enamel, a crease,
then, drawn from the inside,
the whole white weight crumpled
with thunks of deep struck metal,
as a girl, trapped by an earthquake,
might smash keys on a pipe
when she still thinks of rescue.
It’s not a frozen spoon on your tongue.
It’s a mildew eating everything;
the path through the forest is pulp.
The trees weigh up the bad choice
and send a shunt to amputate each leaf.
A cataract ripens on the surface of the sun.
Still, the moss is more inviting now,
soft spires; we could curl down like mites.
The river flexes currents on its surface.
These assertions can be verified by anyone
with a car, or the leisure to daytrip by train,
or a little wood protected by a local council.
We’re used to waiting winter out
like a debilitating cold. Our faith in spring
so strong we’d never call it faith.
It’s statistical analysis: every year we lived,
that year it came. These things can be predicted.
We read FiveThirtyEight. We know it comes,
it must. Or we’re stood in rotting undergrowth,
ankle deep in muck with mittened hands
charged with shifting the axis of the earth.
You didn’t think a private wall could be so long.
It cuts through thin-grass sheep fields,
clay-clubbed lulls, into cattle streams,
past thunderclouds of gorse.
After three uphill miles, you find a door
with a jagged hole the size of your hand.
You can’t resist pressing up to see:
more moor, more heather, a few black birch.
What you can’t know is the wall from the other side.
What the Duke could’ve painted,
perhaps a seaside board with a fat-thin couple
and an oval for your face?
What do your hands look like from over there?
What speech balloon slips tail-first into your mouth?
It’s lucky she has hair like frothy seaweed
that rolls around the sea like it is hair
but now she’s standing naked in the courtyard
it sticks to skin like swathes of sweated chard
so her genitals are shielded by damp greens.
Her horse has also exited the picture
and she’s quietly stepping off the mounting block.
If all of Coventry will turn their backs
and focus on the whitewash down the walls,
or painted cloths if they are burgher’s daughters,
or crusts of daub if they are bootless poor,
then she doesn’t really need to ride the horse
and anyway the beast is flint and muscle
with a bag of broken knuckles in its mouth.
Later she will learn where Peeping Tom lives
and use a hatpin on him while he sleeps.
There’s something in my teeth,
a thread of cress? A beansprout?
I have the urge to cough, little
chuffs, an engine failing to catch
growing to a dark wet hack
until I’m bent clutching my thighs
choking up a swell in my throat.
I hook my finger in and pull
a damp wad of pondweed,
hair from a plughole,
when I feel a kind of worm,
probe up under my tongue
and I can see it just under my nose
white, flailing. I try to rip it
but it’s like thick plastic, it stretches
turning green, then pops up leaves
easy as umbrellas, heart shaped bindweed
crawling up my face, my ears
over my forehead and as I reach
I feel the crown’s white megaphone blooms.
The problem isn’t how, I absolutely know
the answer is to go to a Main Street
some town I don’t live and find a stranger
who hates me, and my clothes, and my voice
and who (while they would never dream
of hurting me in person) suspects
the world would be better with me dead,
and persuade her that she wants to stand
so close my greasy nose presses into hers
and, recycling each other’s soupy breaths,
balance the books between us on our foreheads.
My only problem is how to do that.
*
HOLLY HOPKINS grew up in Berkshire, grew up even more in London and now lives in Manchester. Her debut pamphlet, Soon Every House Will Have One, won the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition and Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Holly has been an assistant editor of The Rialto. She has received an Eric Gregory Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship and was shortlisted for the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize.
Acknowledgements –
Early Winter – Poetry News
Soothsayers – Poetry London