Oxford Poetry Winter 2024/25 (98)

I was talking to a friend recently about poetry and horses. The question we were discussing was this: if horses and humans had not evolved in such close quarters, would we still hear the anapestic foot as propulsive and urgent? Or would we be teaching a version of prosody in which anapestic metre gives a poem a stumbling broken quality, or a silly clownish one, or something else? It seems to me that if we undid horses from the earth, and from our memory, the meaning of the anapest would be entirely up for grabs. I can imagine, for example, an animal who runs on seven legs, none of which are equal in length and some of which atomically disintegrate at random intervals, whose mad foot-beat, over the course of…

with words this pain is good, you said. I put your plate over mine, lined with food stuff. I place my hand over my pen and wait for good letters written from the world inside yet to be opened. Outside, the weather isn't friendly, snow falling violent as the silent majority, as not-brown on silver fields of capital that daily unscaffold the heart. From the hospital bed last night you dreamed about your hospital. I poured water into paper cups for families seated in sterile corridors of Mercy for the expiation of ill-gotten money, senators willing to cease fire on children. True, my love, that poetry better than mine doesn't dampen with the mobility of beauty, the mutability of every day. I let go control and wait for my pen…

Meaning to write… A plaque that reads, come back later At the end of a garden corridor A set of scales that, when stood on, plummets into the minuses Wanting to be cognisant of what's occurring While surrendering to inputs The crenelated graphs of interest and exchange Read over somebody's shoulder… Could there be something hidden in a piece of paper? As if sewn into a pocket A possibility that adds no weight to it A leaf landing or a thumbprint Against the heaviness of what a necklace might have meant Just an image flaking off the morning As if it had no choice - Sourcing everything that way Come back later Waving a crutch in acknowledgement Deciding what to do with the rest of the day…

In my mind the act of snorting is bestial. I become both man and medium, a thing drifting in through the window. A half moan leaves my throat. I hold on by the length of a boat, leaning against the dock. Everything in the world leans against a dock. My fingers, my wrist, the bee, the sun. There's not much to say except I've been a thesp of sorts, a smell of sorts. My monologue is smudged on the interior walls of a boy. Frank begs an aged-temple- of-swimming-niggas: ‘tell me about despair, about thievery, about the dancing horse and his men’. The haloed niggas float in silence, watching the boat. Frank, staring, perfect, is unwilling to say we're condemned to the world; or the world is condemned to us.…

In the end, it felt nothing like the ends of anything. I went nearly to Virginia to learn to love you and now these hands are archives and I believe I am running out of water to share. I am a small ceramic dish with dessert upon me still. Try, first, eating dinner. While you're still here and quite hungry. I was entirely sure I would ask you this, but now we are counting cars in plastic chairs, joined by the flower pots we hung once, when we clapped our hands to rid them of dirt, when we thought we could repair the world only with very pretty things. We were mostly right; great things become faint slowly. Twilight gifts itself aimlessly, there for whoever knows it remains approaching. Oranges…

Your feet will be bare at the foot of a love that grounds you. Time, Like that bird that plucks your future from bowled hands. There is time - Not a consolation, but winging it quickly away from you, your fortune Held tight to its tongue like a hair for its nest, Time's song Disappearing into the white throat of the young of the mother- country. Another country. Unbound. Ungeographical. The cadence of Your hand fitting so perfectly to another's. I used to address the mirror, Counting, trembling, like the stuck minute hand of a clock, My gaze speeding down the drain as Bibi rinsed my face with rose water. I'd lie awake, absence draining through my chest, & give myself, time & again, to the dark. What is in…