'Map' and Other Poems by Rebecca Watts
PN Review 212, July - August 2013
Map
Pinned to the bedside wall, my map
of the British Isles charts temperaments,
anticipates our movements. Its colouring
is arbitrary and without consequence,
except this morning - when, waking too early,
I see that we are both from yellow places
and that while mine spreads out hazily, like a fried egg
left to its own devices, yours is strung up
on tenterhooks, policed by a high-voltage fence,
charged on all sides by blue electrodes.
Streaked with lines, your city is etched
on the faces its ring road runs around.
Then I look upwards at the counties we escape to:
unfolded from the spine of the great north road,
North Yorkshire is a green paint butterfly
freshly opened, poised to be taken in
or to take us floating up to the fluent beauty
of Northumberland, which spills old loveliness
into lakes down west, to sea out east, so we may
choose perfection balanced in the elements or
cold castled ruggedness and thoughts like gales.
Visitor
I find myself standing in the garden
among familiars: pink and yellow roses;
an anniversary bird-bath now wrapped in moss;
the stone-grey football that gathers water
and wheezes like an old man. On the ridged path
loose soil shifts between my toes.
I reach over the back fence, unbolt the gate,
sidestep the fat blackcurrant bush
and weave through avenues of runner beans.
In the heat of the greenhouse, time breathes
slowly, the air heavy as tomatoes;
the same air that hung about your hands.
I make an inventory: cracked flower pots;
radio components awaiting reincarnation;
spilt seeds still clinging to dreams of geraniums.
I close the door. The sun stays inside, dozing.
In the shade of the laburnum your collection of rain
is brimming again. I deliver it. It keeps returning.
The Met Office Advises Caution
While the river turns up its high collar and hurries along,
gulls line up to submit to the fugitive weather.
One jump and air possesses them,
bodies and wings helpless as handkerchiefs
snatched from windows of trains intent on the coast.
Each bird is flaunted against the sky,
a warning to any cyclist still clinging on in the whisked city.
Branches lash out; old trees lie down and don't get up.
Further on, a wheelie bin crosses the road without looking,
lands flat on its face on the other side, spilling its knowledge.
Carpe Diem
Surprised by the underside of a snail -
a beige highlight
on an otherwise black window -
I went to the next room for paper and a pen.
I would have sat for hours in the dark
distilling words from it;
studying the plasticine slur,
the absence of gait,
the way it stuck there
as though on purpose, to rescue
the evening from monotony.
Sooner than I got back
the snail moved on
leaving the window vacant,
a frame to hang a poem on.
The Molecatcher’s Warning
Nobody asked or answered questions out there.
Ten miles from the nearest anywhere
the landscape was a disbanded library.
Only the moles remained
strung on a barbed wire fence,
a dozen antiquated books forced open.
It must've been the north-east wind
or a bandit crow starved of familiar company
that picked them over so -
not a scrap hanging on
inside the stretched, taupe skins,
their spines disintegrating.
They looked sad.
Read in me, they wanted to declare,
how it all ends.
But the threads which once
had a hold on their soft hearts
dangled, loose and crisp.
And their kin
can't read anything
but earth.
Rebecca Watts was born in Suffolk in 1983 and currently lives in Cambridge, where she works for a museum and as a freelance writer and editor. A selection of her poetry was included in New Poetries VI (2015). Her debut collection The Met Office Advises Caution (2016) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and featured in the Guardian and Financial Times ‘Best Books of 2016’ lists. Her second collection, Red Gloves, was published in 2020.
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