Influence
I'd like to have your address so that I can break into your
house and steal something. I want to squeeze between the
rose bush and trellis above your front gate so as not to
disturb your work or sleep and lift the gate latch carefully
and lay it down again. I imagine you sensitive to the sounds
of your surrounds. I could move without shoes and in pools
of darkness provided by leaf foliage, to avoid the moon.
There will
be a path down one side of your house and
I will follow it
with my hands because I believe I can imagine
architecture. It
will be close to the neighbour's fence and he
won't have a dog. I
will crouch in the true posture of a thief
with my hands
forward and my dark clothes.
I read
somewhere that when you write you like to
close the blinds and
write near a blank wall, without wall
hangings. I have no
interest in your art collection but I am
nearing the corner
of your life.
When I have your
address in my hands I will put it to
memory and then fold
it numerously and swallow it at
the corner of your
house where there is one single purple
flower. You will
have a screen door or a French door. It's
where I am with a
small screwdriver or a piece of plastic
removed from the
collar of a business shirt. Can you give
me your address in a
small inner-city terrace house? Or a
detached terrace
with a small garden in the front and, as
I've mentioned,
along the side of the house a small breeze
where the lilac
swayed like a musician. Or a train.
'Celerity Breeze'
could be the name of the jazz leaking from
your wireless near
which I take a watch that sits like a two-
legged spider. I put
it on and go to your study where I
wear the watch that
you left there, too.
I have an image of
you, also, pulling shiny molasses-black
records from their
sleeves, bringing the records close
to your mouth, and
blowing the dust away in one quick
breath. Later when
asleep you hear the quiet distant
thunder. Though it's
not the quiet distant thunder at all
but the full-length
mirror which disguises a cupboard in
your spare room and
I am opening it very slowly. One
sheet of lightning.
Another pool coming away in my hands
like a fish in the
moonlight. Hidden. Not an affair, again, not
an affair. Nor a
jewel or your wife but a path – I take your time.
Although I imagine
that it is possible (even likely) that Luke used the
idea of a writer he
admired as the jumping off point for this poem, I
don't want to know
who the writer is. If he tried to tell me, I wouldn't
listen, I would clap
my hands over my ears. Because the poem dragged
me under very
quickly and I realised that I have 'crouched in the true
posture of a thief'
many many times. And never seen myself at it. Until
now. It is like 'The
Thought-Fox' by Ted Hughes, in that it delivers you,
fully conscious, to
the act of reading, through the fog of the act of reading,
and it is like 'The
Poet's House' by David Musgrave, in the way it has the
true power of a
simulacrum, realer than real.
BTW I had to look up
the title of The Poet's House because I had got it stuck
in my head that it
was called The Rydalmere Sonnets. Odd that, as if I knew
better than the poet
himself what the title of the poem was. One does this sort
of thing sometimes.
Claims a poem by giving it a little twist.
PS I have just
finished typing up this poem, and an image arose in my mind
of Grace Cossington
Smith's painting of the mirrored wardrobe door ajar.
http://www.giramondopublishing.com/category/author/luke-beesley/
