The Room
Elizabeth Jennings


This room I know so well becomes
A way to keep proportion near.
In other houses, other rooms
Only anomalies appear.

I chose these books, the pictures too,
Thinking that I would often look
Upon a canvas like a view
Or find a world within a book.

They lie or hang, each laden now
With my own past, yet there's no sign
For anyone who does not know
Me, that these attributes are mine.

Strange paradox — that I collect
Objects to liberate myself.
This room so heavy now, so decked
Has put my past upon a shelf.

And this is freedom — not to need
To choose those things again. I thus
Preside upon the present, cede
The ornaments to usefulness.

And yet I know that while I clear
The ground and win back liberty,
Tomorrow's debris settles here
To make my art, to alter me.

The Hunt
Don Paterson


By the time he met his death
I'd counted off twelve years
and in the crossed and harrowed path
could read my whole career

the nights of circling alone 
in corridors of earth
the days like paler nights, my lodestone
dying to the north

while I lived by what uncertain meat
was left from his repast
and when rainwater and bitter light
could worm in through the crust

And in that time my axe had swung
no closer to his neck
than the echo of his sullen tongue
or the hot smell of his wake

Though now and then I'd find a scrap
of gold thread in the dirt
and once, a corner of the map
she'd sewn into my shirt

I had no use for either here
being so long deranged
by the tortuous familiar
as once I'd been the strange

Then one day near the heart, making 
a break in my patrol
I drained my flask and leant my aching
back against the wall

Across the way I saw a gap.
I conjured up a flame
and cupped it down twelve narrow steps
into an airless tomb

I gave the light from side to side.
The little vault unfurled
its mockery of the life I'd led
back in the upper world

The walls were lined with skinbound books
the floor with braided hair
in the corner, stuck with shite and wax
a bone table, a bone chair

On the table lay a dish of gall
and by it, for my lamp
a thighbone propping up a skull
inside, a tallow stump

I gently slid my spill into
one eye, then cut my breath
until a thin partitioned glow 
strained out between the teeth

It was then my misbegotten quarry
swam up from the gloom
loitering in the darker doorway
to a second room

We shuffled close, like two old fools
and stood there for an age
trying to recollect the rules
by which we were enraged

I read no terror in his frown
no threat and no intrigue
the massive head was canted down
in pity or fatigue

so I put my hand out, hoping this
might break our dead impasse
and he had made to tender his
when my hand hit the glass

The Charles River

Robert Lowell

1.

The sycamores throw shadows on the Charles,

as the fagged insect splinters, drops and joins

the infinite that scatters loosening leaves,

the long-haired escort and his short-skirted girl.

The black stream curves as if it led a lover—

my blood is pounding; in workaday times,

I take cold comfort from its heartelation,

its endless handstand round the single I,

the pumping and thumping of my overfevered wish...

For a week my heart has pointed elsewhere:

it brings us here tonight, and ties our hands—

if we leaned forward, and should dip a finger

into this river's momentary black flow,

infinite small stars would break like fish.

Heliographer
Don Paterson


I thought we were sitting in the sky.
My father decoded the world beneath:
our tenement, the rival football grounds,
the long bridges, slung out across the river.
Then I gave myself a fright
with the lemonade bottle. Clunk —
the glass thread butting my teeth
as I bolted my mouth to the lip.

Naw...copy me. It's how the grown-ups drink.
Propped in my shaky,
single-handed grip,
I tilted the bottle towards the sun
until it detonated with light,
my lips pursed like a trumpeter's.