small, speechless, as if they’d always been there.
The white cloud at the window was striped with railings.
She set out pots of beans in rows,
watered the compact earth. The children grew
tall and pale and stilted, she thought, their loose
limbs stringed. She bought a rabbit, fenced a corner
of the kitchen for it. She bought a dog or two.
The straw walked. The bean stalks grew. The children
came and went. The days put out runners, sported years.
She remembered there were words for this – her tether,
and the roof. She side-stepped. She bought an aviary,
hung it like a second skin in the single bedroom: cagey,
elastic and tremulous. The children demanded finches.
She told them how she’d cut a door to match the door,
how she’d step inside, just for a minute.
She told them there were no two ways about it.
Spital Square
(for George & Clarissa)
She doesn’t know yet what she’s doing here,
but she’s dressed for it in black with purple
curtain-fabric patches on her duffle bag.
Her scarf’s cerulean to the sky’s shot silk.
She is standing in the middle of the square
naming the parts of the houses – fanlight,
portico – like a child curating its small possessions.
She notes embrasures of rusticated coade stone.
She also remembers the boat that brought her here,
the great illuminated globes of Liverpool Street
overhead in the domed dark where footsteps
without visible feet sounded on metal walkways.
She’s not an architect yet, she’s not anything,
but yesterday when she read how an eighteenth
century tourist wrote of London’s terraces
they give the idea of cages with sticks and birds,
she sensed the shape of things she wants to communicate.
The spire reflected in the weavers’ clerestories: that
comes into it, and the clouds’ scribbled annotations –
their almost legible graphs for dormer, sky, light.
Object Lesson
Sunday morning and a train cuts slowly through the skyline
like a ship pulling out of harbour between crazily paved
rooftops and aerials and laundry’s limp semaphore across
a window where someone holds two halves of a plate
like an archaeologist finding out sequence, or lifts
her pearls as if each formed an elliptical opening on the world.
She looks like the photo a woman might have shown
to her children, captioned ‘my mother before I was born’.
The pearls, their milk-white reflection.
She must already be someone’s daughter.
But this morning she’s alone in her room with the sky
and its squat church at anchor, with the train passing through.
She thinks there’s something she might make of it.
It must be going somewhere. It looks emblematic.
By now, it will have got to Canterbury years ago.
Initialisation
(for John)
When all poems’ lines began with capital initials
Houses had roots that ran down into the ground.
The rooms of the houses were the mind’s interiors
Whose fingers walked them like a compositor’s
Seeing feelingly the type tray’s upper and lower
Orders, separating h from o and murmuring
Over the dark matter of the open spaces: mmmn.
When all poems’ lines began with capital initials
There were no orphans and widow was erratum
For window, or windows: square, self-justifying,
Perfectly aligned. Each showed a landscape
And its familiars of off-white house, cliff,
Estuary: the mind’s furniture that’s configured
And reconfigured each time the poet who inhabits
The A-framed attic of the house with its view
Of a dinghy bravely bent on the horizon writes
A poem whose lines all begin with capital initials
And each initial forms an aperture on a world
In miniature whose immaculate gilt sun
Illuminates the house, the boat, the open spaces
Of the ocean O without end before the fall.
The Question of Things Not Happening
Sometimes nothing gives.
Your smile, an open invitation
that led to nothing in particular.
The dead letters piled on the carpet.
The twice-daily grind of the door.
Sometimes the signs are against us.
Detour. Delays possible till August.
Sometimes there are no signs –
just a black spin where the road
elides to ice, an obdurate stone wall.
And then, above the ploughed field,
birdsong. A weak sun. All calm
as if the girl might step unharmed
from her crumpled body in a world
where life carries on, like before.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Griffiths was born in Exeter in 1970, and brought up in Devon and Holland. After reading English at Oxford, where her poem ‘The House’ won the Newdigate Prize, she worked as a book-binder in London and Norfolk. Returning to Oxford, she completed her doctorate on the Tudor poet John Skelton and worked on the Oxford English Dictionary for two years. After teaching English Literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and then at the universities of Edinburgh and Bristol, she now teaches at Wadham College, Oxford. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. Her book Another Country: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which included a new collection, Eclogue Over Merlin Street (2008), together with large selections from her previous two Bloodaxe collections, A Grip on Thin Air (2000) and Icarus on Earth (2005), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe are Terrestrial Variations (2012), and Silent in Finisterre (2017), which received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © Jane Griffiths 2017
First published 2017 by
Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Eastburn
South Park
Hexham
Northumberland NE46 1BS
This ebook first published in 2017.
www.bloodaxebooks.com
For further information about Bloodaxe titles
please visit our website or write to
the above address for a catalogue.
Cover design: Neil Astley & Pamela Robertson-Pearce.
The right of Jane Griffiths to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN: 978 1 78037 357 7 ebook
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