The seventh book
On the seventh shelf
Is a book by Paul Muldoon
The seventh poem
Is The Cure For Warts
The first line is:
Had I been the seventh son
Of a seventh son
Now, you can say what you like
About coincidences
But it is a poem where death
And death’s cure raise their heads
On page seventy-seven
Sits a poem entitled
The unicorn defends himself
I feel that It would be best to leave it at that
Today’s still-life
Is a plate, painted
With apple, with blossom
A cup, also painted
A hunting scene
With horsemen, dogs, a fox
The plate sits on top
Of a book of selected poems
By Anna Akhmatova
Which itself sits on top
Of an almost blank sketchbook
From Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Two Harris-Tweed coasters
Complete the scene
Atop the small oak table
No more five AM departures
No more falling asleep at the wheel
During the four hour drive
To the south-coast workplace
Yes, the consultant told me
That the damaged thumb nail
Was a sign of trauma
Either physical, or psychological
I though have no memory of such events
Some things you see
Are often easily discarded
Whilst others just go on and on and on
What do you see in me
What do I see in you
What does someone else see
In a linkage about to be broken
No more five AM departures
Yet still falling asleep at the wheel
Caught up by the tiredness
Caught up in those dreams of yesteryear
My partner does not want me to write the 2004 words in our Monday Morning Writers Café. She wonders if I am craving for my ex, or hankering after my past life.
I tell her that absolutely that is not the case, but I do understand what she says when she says that she could be hurt by listening to my story, especially with our friends in the group, sat there alongside us.
Once the sun rose at four-thirty, once my heart skipped a beat; I will write this book, somehow to make worthy, or re-engender, the poems of my shuffling feet.
Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, on my birthday, the 4th of February to be precise; nothing much else happened on that day, no photographs, no poetry, indeed no poems for another month.
I must look back into the boxes, surely I wrote something, though I have never put dates on my handwritten notes, I don’t know why, an early maladroit oversight; but once begun, forever kept up to.
The next photographs are in March, family snaps at home; by chance there is one of my favourite photographs - my ex is by the fire, possibly lighting the fire, on the television screen beside her, is a message which reads: Lost at Sea.
A perfect example I think of how it sometimes is good to both show and tell; it often adds to the articulation, in this instance it is right on the money, for me it is truly most effective.
There is a poem called Brussels, but I don’t remember going there in 2004; I did go three years later for my MA dissertation, I wrote poetry about art, about art in the cathedral, about art in the Musee des Beaux Arts.
The poem talks about the price of Drum tobacco in duty-free; now I have never been a fan of roll your own, when I did smoke it was king-sized filter tip - Peter Stuyvesant, or Camel Light.
So, if if I was looking to buy the loose stuff it must have been for someone else, maybe as a gift, or a warning.
I have chosen not to give up on this book, it is after all the final year before my relationship came apart for the last time, before finally coming to an end.
Might I see some signs; did I miss out on what was going on, or what was not going on.
In any event it is I who will raise the questions, also most likely it is I who will posit the answers.
Answers, such as they might or might not continue to be; let us hope occasionally the questions and answers are congruent.
The quotation at the front of the book is taken from Jonathan Stedall’s poem Trust, which is from his collection No Shore Too Far.
Flickering leaf
Your life so small
A cloud for backdrop
Grey turning to gold
Bringing the morning
Breeze blown streams
Beside you the tree, the tree is already bare
Slimmed down to a minimal load
For the winter ahead
Blues, pinks
Wander over the skyline
Shepherd’s warning red sky morning
Still like a skeleton
Magnificent from branch to branch
Closing down for another year
No nests to survive, just you and the sky
With your friend in the foreground
Still covered in leaf
Every cloud has a silver lining
In this early sunrise morning
Bewitched by the gaze of the pink, of the blue
Light glorious light
From where once again
Your pleasure never stops calling
The Levels and the Mendips
Under water-born dew
Natural friendships; oaks, sycamores, sunlight
Shadows cast across the canal
Into the orchard, seeking out
The laws of relative relativity
Rising by the metre
Rising by the mile
Over railway-lines, over radio-waves
The horizon becomes the centre
Settling a balance into the work
The low trees red leaves are waking
The cold grass
Aglow with sprinkled sunshine
Pathways wandering in the waves of fall
Warmth rising
From between the space and the time
From betwixt the here and the now
