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Andrea Brady
The Coal-Searcher
Arrayed in nurse’s uniforms with watch-pins stand the sympathies of the material world, at attention, reviewing the list of needs. The trap set in Basque oak, killed off the last ever natural sign of the oath, pledged by men for their community. So a boy moaning under a shin of bark, his mother cruel as a chain pull no way to get in or out of love dies also
and with him goes all hope of enthralling the land with what is called here ‘native spirit’. Up in smoke and ash the moon tramps like a quarter-horse, all the trunks are quartered, knotted fibres crackle under the stress of feet. At the centre, in cinders, an act of language that set all to blazes; its mandate expired the constitutional crisis of a king with his tongue cut.
Over stunt pastures eyes narrow, looking past stumps like jungle gyms, seeking relatives searching for the identifying scar. Could the scarred field some evidence that love, compacted and ready to explode, might be somewhere to be seen, or that the ticking in its works where the water drips and the spindles smoky with speed could run along the cord to the boy in the burlap bag and detonate in his face, I would go back
home a happier person, and not shudder with fear as I feed each chunk singly into the stove. But the head is hidden in a heap of slag, air consumed by hulks neither foreign nor really interested.
Temple Star
She feels ropey
flashes a nylon strand, burden, staggered, nun
across white taught lawn. Sit still,
and the grown-up talk straight
-acting, solvent
bonder seeks warming casket.
Copes with a market of info, grey coils
mist up to rock ledge, pico.
A surveyor stands up alone by his orange visor,
coils reach doting black to the doorframe.
Sublime in lawn, comes up just as far
as one house, with studio addition.
Leisure-ridden, I am tea-stained lip goes
like old paper in wind goes filo
racket. Grey’s Inn a grey square
hurl a packet over, filled with fish
the size of almonds, mercurial moralists
fix on its fin to your infant,
freeze its progress in aspic. A translation of zero.
“Answers in the form of letters please”, box
office number punched like a doppler reading
on jaw grit, sewn-down teeth.
Passing busses make them hum like telephones
and all the people breathing on metal,
to each other temple.
Bars ring against tin cups and slagging
posthumous matches. The bailiffs
come for the atmosphere, and afterwards, letters.
Night Cakes the Bodies
As a coal crumbling in bellied glasses
goes on for its certain time, so this smile
of gratitude for the waiter, when he’s still at the bar.
A belt turns in its loop, glands flutter with sugar,
the slow pan sears distance onto a canvas;
and when winter snaps like a card over the spine,
punishing the soft-spoken cadets with a ledge
carotid in the student toilets, only alight
among the borrowers, hair woven in
yellow on darkest brown. In bowls with business
cards for the ideal home draw, how much more
does patterns on a plate,
and the light splitting from loose panels
where they crack like burnt sugar over grass.
If I could answer the mechanical ring and make
it sing in recognition, that’s not to say
the dumb black-out shape would speak,
drawn out of sleep into the cold of an imprecise taste.
Tongue guards its buds, who migrate with age,
sitting around is an absolute bonus. My neck
slaps with new flesh and blood
runs up to the rim: what is that breath you draw
first, a smell of oranges or liquor or beef,
and the cold journey turned by your frame
into the whole joint, the whole life, so far.
Triple Time
True life waving in silver marks
the intersection of all our possibilities:
before you know it you are
on them, a creator, mittened and brave.
The work of grazing, building an aspect
made of all our resemblances
multiplies the hope that you are
and always will be, vehicle in the world
to the good life contracted. It is no saint
already, its wet bed no bundled hayrack
we may not regret the piercing
we age with. But the light shining
from the epochal hole in the gate,
from the dark where
the echogenic pulse empties into bone
is an echo of all possible lights: the same
that emanated from you across
the impossibilities of ever knowing how,
to be called to happiness, to that resemblance.
Life worth crowning, bird worth feeding.
Copyright © Andrea Brady, 2008
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