Poems
What was the point of a landscape’s allegories,
or the show of fractured bedrock in Bellini’s
Transfiguration, the way it caught the folding
and tightening, the rough-shod squeezing of old
strata, and the intrusion of the igneous, ferns’
When I think of Bach, I recall powdered wigs, a dim, gilded hall, limelight burning on a stage, rouged cheeks, finely turned men’s calves in stockings. I am in the audience, I am in a box seat, I am holding a fan, but really, I am nowhere at all.
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Red maya birds that are not
maya birds, but sparrows and munias.
Words for the kind of rain that will leave us
without power for days, then the kind that sprinkles on
After I cut your hair, running
the clippers back and forth
until the tiles are littered with tufts
like grey lint swept from the drum
for Yumna Kassab
As the bridge appears the train changes its music
Hollow and open like a drum
Every sentence curves to amplify itself the way blue
springs over and we say ‘sky’
Where the plantations begin
The scent of the earth, the true-born.
A foot on the earth, your earth.
An electrified fence to keep the cows from straying.
A motorboat’s propellor chops like a machete across the tide
sending a swift, breaking wave to the shore. I walk slowly
over rocks that are scored, overhung by a low, acned cliff.
In one of the rockpools an octopus stretches away
What lasts as well as this illustration of the ark
kept over since childhood? The closed cabin,
that dark indoors, huge and somehow private,
like all homes of love. The shake of the storm
To land within a corona of jonquil, portal
to retrospect, with the immanence of insect. A thorax
hottens, sensational, in its own yellow canopy.
Being, flown via surprise winter (at rest, in instinct)
Read the five shortlisted poems for ABR’s 2025 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.
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