Two Poems by Denise Riley
PN Review 98, July - August 1994.
December
Now the dark overcoats go slamming shut all round.
The rain.
And sparrows scraping under rusted leaves
The striped vines blackened and snarled.
Pitted grapefruit of the moon, peel off to a white furred pith!
And leave the dreamers of faces alone.
Moonface. To read the human onto everything
And loose a shower of syrup over zinc.
Being too many people, uselessly.
A whole day's words seep through the sponge head
Of the sleepless hearer, cell speakers puff and foam all night,
Press in on her the sheerest accident - that she
Is not squatting in caves, boiling up grass to feed my daughters
If I do not get shot in the fields, combing them for edible weeds
As here, there, the air
Shoves in to make swollen a space bled thin by any human going out.
White I cram through Shadwell Wapping and Rotherhithe blurred
Lights burning in the homes waiting.
And I can let myself sag down onto the floor in a cascade
like a long curtain with a heavy hem
Since I continue to be held up
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Lyrical
To be air or a black streak on air, or be silt.
Be any watery sheen threading brackish, or vein
nets tracked as patted under their skin glaze, running all ways.
Cascade of stubs.
Buttercup metal glow, ruff of dark strawberry tulle
in any vehement colour night you get blown into hundreds.
Is that clear as a glass stem cups its chill in its own throat.
Is it true that candour so tightens the integument of the heart
that quartz needles shower from the cut mouth of the speaker
though the voice opens to fall:
If you can see me, look away
but swallow me into you
And I must trust this need is held in common, as I think it my duty to
that the head tries to hide itself in sun in the teeth of its dream
of translucence.
That every down-draught's thick with stiffening feathers
with rustlings from pallor throats
as the air hangs with its free light and its death weight equally.
These poems are taken from PN Review 98, July - August 1994. Subscribe to PN Review magazine at pnreview.co.uk.