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Poems
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The Shape of Nothing Happening |
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Written by Patrick McGuinness
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The Shape of Nothing Happening
Dust knows the places we have forgotten, or we never see,
marking out the margins of our world: the windowledge’s
cracked paint, the bevelled edges of a doorframe,
the dado rails, the skirting boards, stifling the emphatic
corners of our lives. It fills the gulf behind the sofa,
that small domestic void that stands for losing and forgetting,
or for finding once again. It stands for things
that outlive their necessity, for us busily outliving
ours: particles slow dancing in a shaft of light
shedding the excess that each day we renew.
Its tininess is a feat of scale, but it cannot disapppear.
It is the shape of nothing, the shape of nothing happening,
and of nothing’s impossibility; matter worrying away
at trying not to be, and being all the while; reminding us
there are no absolutes, that all is graded on the scale,
that all is incremental, deciduous, and undecided.
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The Age of the Empty Chair |
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Written by Patrick McGuinness
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The Age of the Empty Chair
In Monet’s The Beach at Trouville, it is week one of the Franco-Prussian war.
The chair lodges in the sand between two women. One reads, the other
points her face at the emptying beach. The chair belongs to no-one,
it is a found chair, a trouvaille, and there is never one chair too many
but one sitter too few. A flag rigid on its pole indicates
a swelling in the air, or something stronger, and the rent waves,
delicate turmoils of spume and lace, are distant cousins of the revolution
bound into the ebb and flow it breaks free of, then breaks back into.
There is sand in the paint; the place is mixed into its making
and even the brushstrokes replicate the water’s peaks as they take
the light: rooves pell-mell across a city skyline, flashpoints in the sun.
The chair suggests all that can be suggested about change, but it remains
apart from it: the way a sail implies the wind, the way a shell holds
a recording of the waves even as the waves turn around it.
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Written by Patrick McGuinness
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Noon at the Doubletree
From here the river looks like a road
surprised by its own keen swerve,
the boaters stitching the water’s skin as above them
a Boeing rends the sky and the sky heals over.
It’s all inaudible through
the triple-glazed panes, but by something in that
improbable clear blue we know it’s heavy with noise,
drenched in spent jet fuel,
and the bright blue emptiness
is emptiness only, a desert of burned-off ozone
where the sun’s ferocious waste scatters
its perfect, equalising light.
Shadows straighten up,
level with the shapes that throw them – house, high-rise,
Hummer – then disappear, and for a moment
all is its original, unencumbered self.
The clock’s hands cross.
The two halves of the day come face to face.
The grainy, detailed hours have reached their zenith,
now they fall away.
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Written by Patrick McGuinness
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Surfers in a Wing mirror
Closing on Rest Bay, we see the surfers,
half-boy, half board, sea-centaurs
scaling rolling waterwalls. They live for waves,
for rumours of waves,
cresting the water’s rise and fall, ridging
hills of spume, water-
-mountaineers borne up by what consumes them:
fall;
driving past we watch them disappear,
distorted in the wing-mirror’s
mannered version of themselves; arms
at right angles to their torsos,
a marine rodeo of elongated limbs
whose foam and water horses
run themselves into the sand. Matter
clothing energy,
half bodies now, half forms of thought,
a revolution of the waves:
insurgents storming barricades of air
Published in Metre, Spring 2005 |
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Written by Patrick McGuinness
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Ultrasound
I
Noiseless swirls of dark.
Then a flash, a white zodiac.
He is like morning:
flesh, a body dawning;
his skeleton a silver filament,
his body a bulb in a roomful of night.
II
The Plough stalls on black acres, furrows
tilled and seeded; the earth broken
where the star baby turns and grows.
A first page dropping anchor in the ink.
Published in Metre, Spring 2005 |
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Poems