The bearded woman with amber eyes
makes him tie elfin aprons to his shoes
which glide like galoshes over the polish
of the timbers while the bride’s stilettos
tap-tap up the stairs without reproach or restraint
The woman scraped away these walls
to reveal layered fauns and fountains
but when he plucks the harp that waits for him there
it lets of a slack dead sound. Escaping
their scrutiny he secrets himself in the mock
‘Poet’s Room’. The desk: a quill still rests across
parchment by a notebook embossed Poesie
He lifts the feathery pages loose from the flaking
leather spine and finds that they are blank
July/November 2006
Riga Duet
Prison Camp Violin
A brittle fiddle someone
Turns this on a lathe
Of the spheres where
Replica becomes the real
Thing thin
Birch treated knocked up
Catches an unhuman
Voice in its hollow
Thumbs moulded to pegs
Skewered into splintering holes
Tune the stolen wires a
Mollusc curled at neck’s end
Fingernails
Pluck the kinked tune free
Out of itself a
Collapsed bridge
Sabotaged by
Time mittens
Grapple
The soup-bone bow-grip
Horse hair human
Hair taut straight like a well
Brushed bride’s
Bends the tamed twig
Tucked under your chin the violin
Splinters against your jaw
As you draw the grinty
Voice out from the mechanics
Of survival: extinct
Livonian love song
Mute Piano
This box could house
A stethoscope or
Paintbrushes its
Leather strap sags
A conspiring smile
Unclip the lid in
A double-thumbed
Ritual of rhyming
Clasps and prop
It open a jack-
In-a-box grin of black
And nicotine octaves
Three there potential
But one key escaped
Gives the game away
A peep-hole to the void
Imagined
Mechanics beneath
Coal-grained
Half-frozen fingers that
Soothe the smooth keys
And then in a furious
Double-fisted cluster
Rattle them with the
Padding stealth of
Rats upon boards
Stealing moist bread
From mute mouths
In 2018 'Prison Camp Violin' became the Guardian Poem of the Week (see here) All three poems were published in Berlin Bursts (details here) and 'Prison Camp Violin' was selected for History or Sleep (see here)
