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in this issue
A Generation of Emerging Poets
Kathryn Gray
Kathryn Gray, raised in Swansea, lives in London, where she writes theatre reviews. Her first book, The Never-Never was shortlisted for the prestigious 'Forward Prize for First Collection' in 2004.
1. The Pocket Anglo-Welsh Canon
One day, you and I
will walk the aisles of libraries,
with their plausible stink
of the shut generations
to pass over an entire canon
that's long been thumbed
to stub and take
from some or other imagined shelf
the intimate apocrypha.
Cloth binding will be opened-out in prayer,
the warp of weather
down the stone and across denominations,
where air is more than lost,
gone a pointillism of coal dust.
I mean the cant of the great and good
who never made us famous,
and in the first language, namely English.
And I swear that
though these words were never ours,
they will have happened like a history,
share that taste
of copper on the tongue,
have a certain easiness
with human heat;
they'll be the pure that's cast
by men in ballots,
a pickling of steel.
How the negative
was to right the light from dark,
the schoolroom's slag-flood glare
will wake dead arms.
This, the book we hold and in our hands.
2. The Book of Numbers
The last four digits of your number
I can't remember:
the first might be
her winning call at bingo,
some of the houses
(evens on a street)
I never lived in.
A pack of John Player's,
then double Mahler's
whatever, the Chanel counter,
acrylic sienna daubed
into an earlobe-shaped space
on the canvas
or a coin produced from a sleeve,
during an evening's prestidigitation
and the deck of incontinent cards
that spills and skims
from the croupier's hands.
The times shuffle
for each departure gate at Heathrow
or the trains on a station concourse
I've memorized in no particular order,
a date for Waterloo,
then the buses tour Trafalgar Square,
the total degrees to all those angles,
collapsed roughly to the equator,
tiers becoming slices of wedding cake;
the vital percent off that dress,
without which no man can buy or sell,
or else a tetragram,
Which brings me back more or less
to what I mean,
the last four digits of your number
I can't remember.
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