Three Poems by Chris Jones

PN Review 181, May - June 2008

Stammel

Of this word I know not the meaning (Dr Johnson)

The quiver of the year, lurching into its shallowest dawn
around the solstice corner

The juddering gears of its turn scattering angry rooks
before broken onlookers.

The unthreading fear in a stomach
which honest food cannot feed.

The hidden lesion rubbed raw
by a coarse woollen hairshirt.

The shrivel in the synapse
when the dopamine dries

out. Cry of the ewe
when she loses her unborn lamb

And though I do not know the meaning of this word
Today it finds me here -- still stammelling on.

Or it can also happen...

after Gael Turnbull (1928-- 2004)

... as a driftwood jewel,
unmoored from roots and shore,
worn on its long, sinuous course
into shapes of reassuring strangeness,
is then returned to the disbelieving palm
and buoys a failing heart once more.

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Borges on the Wall

A song of truth I can drive out --
How the blind and brittle poet
asked to be hand-led by youth
down to the sea and along
the crooked harbour cobb --
trembling index of Saint Andreas,
whose knuckle-bones stretch to Jutland...
His stuttering tread faltered
against uneven, frost-stained stones,
until, at the end of the world, he stood to face
the North Sea's unlocked cruelty
(here, some versions say he faced the wrong way)
And then hurled verses of Beowulf at the spindrift,
expelling the storehoused grief of a life on loan
his pampas-dry, defiant tongue
lacing songs of the long-dead with latin accents,
the frayed syllables sinking into spume and spray:
Næs hearpan wyn -- gomen in geardum --
Who knows at what wharf whose
hands hauled that cargo home?

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These poems by Chris Jones are taken from PN Review 181, May - June 2008. Further contributions from Jones are available in the archive to paying subscribers, as well as more poetry, features, reviews and reports from across the back catalogue.

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