Two Poems by Angela Leighton

PN Review 201, September - October 2011

Angels at Blythburgh

Every angel is terrible — Rilke

Not these - rough types, parked like jets on the mid-beam's
 guiding cross,
nailed on ancient joists like stiffened birds -
 what is it about them? -
buttoning the rafters, eyeing us still with their big,
 mummy-coffin eyes, old dolls of melancholy lovingkindness?

 Such dodgy foils,
guarding a place at the limits,
 and scarred in the wars -
yet that straight stare disarms us, wins a pause ...
 what in the world?
Watchers, blessers, keepers, their wood-wormy coffers
 measure how far

it is to all of heaven we dream of - bold
 geegaws, oddballs,
primitives in furious colour, clasps holding
 a cover together.
So is this all? these winged bolts on high,
 goalies, fallguys,
guarding a gateway no one remembers anymore?

Cantilena: At Ostia Antica

Forse per ogni pietra, ogni fiore selvatico,
passa l'anima vagabonda, persa nel mondo.

Light breaks even in the evening light, wins
a pipistrelle clean, to time -
flighty chatterer, singing into dips and stops of air,
almacantar
of the rarer altitudes beyond our ears.
What makes you raid
the dusk's echoing alveary, sound-search its hollows
like open hallways on a world unheard?

Love, stop a while. It's dusk at the gate.
The dead and living to their separate quarters
gravitate. A hush speaks
in breathing aspirates:
stay, outstay, your time, your ticket, pause
on the way, where a bat, see, slippy as a thin shade,
beats, breakbeats
a world in sound waves till the sound makes way.

Nella breve sosta della vita, Siste Viator.
Nell'alto dell'orecchio, ascolta, fra tenebre e pietre.

---

Angela Leighton was born in Wakefield to a Yorkshire father and a Neapolitan mother. As a result, doubleness has always been a part of her life, whether thinking in English or Italian, as a literary critic or a poet. She has published many works of criticism, most recently 'Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature' (2018), as well as four volumes of poetry: 'A Cold Spell' (2000), 'Sea Level' (2006), The Messages (2012), and 'Spills' (2016), which includes memoir, fiction and translations from the Italian. Her next collection, ‘Something, I Forget’ will be published in October 2023.

She returns often to Yorkshire and to Italy, usually to walk about, watch and listen. Those activities often become the seeds of her poems, in particular the absent-minded activity of walking.

Subscribe to PN Review magazine at pnreview.co.uk.