Travel Book
The Oracle Rooms by Fred Johnston
Night Music
Wind-drunk gulls angle and tip,
A boat lazes like a woman after sex
Stretched on a couch.
It could be anywhere, a time of year
Out of time. The islands ghost away.
Boys pant and sniffle
Waiting for the old men to grunt.
Under the bare arm
Of the diving board, in the dark
That smells of salt.
And in the orange light
Drizzling on the empty promenade,
Snot-nosed other lads brazen out
The smiling cars:
Men of impeccable character fuck them.
Bubble
for Xenia Gerasimova
I will go to Moscow in my head,
See the onion domes peel off their light in the sun,
Walk the Square where, at one side,
Imprecise as a slip of ink on paper
Someone will wave; I will know the sounds
Of the words meshing around me,
The talk of ordinary people making the world:
I will wear a fur hat and wait, as if reading
Towards the end of a story by Lermentov,
For the challenge, the offer of choice of weapons –
While small snow flickers in a change of season
There are boot-prints encrypting in the frozen grass,
When I nod two unmoving figures
Drown in a welter of spun water.
The Poet’s House
at Finnavarra, Co. Clare
You enter by walking on water,
The flat miracle of washed stones.
The islands lie like cushions
On the rumpled quilt of the Atlantic –
You can sense a turning in the bones,
At first thrown off like an Autumn shiver
But not quite going. Superstitions
Waddle like swans on the black rock:
You are out of reach of TVs, telephones,
The ordinary others that make you
Sure. The heart gives a consenting quiver,
The outline of the house is visible
Against the hilled wet grasses:
The scholar-nib's first black incision.
Paris from Le Parmentier
for Simon Green
This is the centre. You feel
Trains pulse under your feet
Like blood. Here the street
Spokes inwards
To the hub of a wheel.
The wheel turns. Africa goes
On bare feet, a drum sounds
Or a girl moves like water, drowns
A parched heart,
And our time slows.
Time slows again. Afternoon,
Flowers blink in flowerpots
Balanced in precarious boxy lots
On high balconies,
A radio plays a rap-tune.
Rap francais; men joke
At the counter over beading beer,
Talk horse racing, hear what they hear
Some argue football,
A dog sleeps in the smoke.
