'Come In, Number Seven!' and Other Poems by Miles Burrows
PN Review 216, March - April 2014
The Figure in the Tapestry
A woman is doing her embroidery in the converted chapel.
And there is Priam in his seven-walled city, look,
That tumbles over the Umbrian hill like golden syrup.
And who is that stumpy figure
Hopping on one leg? Rumpelstiltskin?
Crows punctuate the sky. And as she dozes
The figure opens its mouth as if to cry
Or drink. In his lapel two poppies
(Remembrance and Oblivion). In her mind
He is saying this, though not in speech.
– Think Dunkirk in reverse
With half the boats and twice the angels
Not all of them guardian. Our mission was
To rescue that young woman for Burne-Jones
And bring with us the first slave-owning democracy
In the Western world. At the time, Empires were collapsing
With the demise of domestic service. When 48%
Of butlers had the equivalent of MSc in sociology
It was time to take the gilt frames off The Voyage to Cythera.
We went out there with attitude. We knew
Helen was being gang-raped by old men twittering like bats.
There could be a run on the drachma. Where was Onassis?
Everyone needs his Dardanelles.
I had a photo of Penny back in Suffolk
And missed the teenage years of my son,
But looking back with hindsight
I’d say we had the balance right, because
The future’s in the past and this was now.
We were fighting for Byron, Stowe, the Elgin Marbles,
The survival of the Classics Department,
For Regent’s Park Crescent, Euston Arch. Sooner or later
We were all going to be dug up by Schliemann.
His wife would try on our funeral masks.
We were very chilled, very focused, looking forward to it.
When we got back… Dithyrambs were like: Excuse me?
Everyone was dancing ceroc. Déjà vu was a coffee bar.
People were curious we could pre-date Hotel California.
Steeped in antiquity like old teabags,
We were used by art students to smear over white paper
For a distressed background: they needed us for that.
The Meaning is in the Gaps
1. In the gap between two chairs, there is no third chair.
If there was a third chair, there would be no gap.
2. In the gap between meals, there is the snack.
Between the poem’s words, we imagine the snack,
Unable to wait for the next word.
3. Some animals snack all the time. (Planckton, buffalo.)
They are grazers. There is no gap.
Does their life have no meaning?
4. There are gaps in birdsong. Meaningful,
As we may say ‘She closed the door pointedly’.
But the birds are still preening, gathering twigs.
They sleep with eyes open, imagining gaps in their dreams
So that gaps still occur, and the gaps in the song have character,
A relief after chiselling at the dawn.
5. An artist fakes an antique fragment, and buries it under the lawn.
This is called the Cult of the Fragment.
6. Somepoetssaving paperleavenogaps.
Their creations are swipecard numbers
And make sense in relation to another secret poem
Known only to the poet or his friends.
The poem is the gap, into which the key is inserted.
8. People are always crying out for meaning
As if it was an amount of small change that was being withheld.
Come In, Number Seven!
I lost my small poetic craft:
It foundered in the water
With Nero’s collapsing wedding boat
And the sea king’s daughter.
I did not know my fore from aft
But tried to strike a cheerful note
By reading Kulturwissenschaft:
Now seaweed is my overcoat.
My wedding bed is understaffed.
I lost my religion at the Tote,
And couldn’t get an overdraft.
Now I’m a cub reporter.
My head’s above water, my head’s in the air
And yet I’m not Apollinaire.
(Ah non mon petit frère
Au mien crepusculaire
Craquelant de savoir-faire).
A single bar electric stove
Will teach us all we need of love
And how the constellations move.
Miles Burrows studied at Charterhouse and Wadham College Oxford. He read Russian in National Service, then Classics and Medicine. He worked as travel and fiction reviewer at the New Statesman and his poems appeared on radio and television. His first collection, A Vulture’s Egg, was published by Cape and reviewed by John Carey. His work has been anthologised in British Poetry since 1945 (Penguin: ed. Lucie-Smith) and in Best Poems of the Year 2012 (Forward). His collected poems, Take Us the Little Foxes, was published by Carcanet in 2021. He is a regular contributor to TLS, Poetry Review, and PN Review. He has worked as a doctor in New Guinea, Thailand, and Haverhill. He lives in Cambridge.
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