Poetry by Jack Underwood
Your horse
has arrived and is bending himself into the room,
refolding his legs. I knuckle his nose,
which reminds me of the arm of a chair.
He is talking low and steady,
rolling back an eye towards his chestnut brain.
Man-words are climbing his long throat.
I show him to the bathroom
and he is embarrassed. Next he is hooving
through your photo album.
There are more of me, than of him.
We are crunching on polo mints together
and remembering the way your body used to move.
Brother Hen
for Tom
has built a new coop
high as himself, on dog-proof stilts
in worm-rich earth. He reaches his long arm
through the chicken door, explores,
finger-tipping for egg warm shapes.
He lifts one out, careful and astonished,
as if retrieving a voice from an oven.
I tell my Brother Hen I have a system
for the soft-boiled, about my trick with salt
under the lid, but he knows best that an egg
should not be cajoled or spooned, but is
an internal balancing act, a system of its own,
to be held aloft, regarded as an example
of grace and the duty of hens.
Enchilada’s Allusions
Eighty years from now, a man lifting whisky
in a stubby tumbler, will loudly mis-quote
the not yet late Francois Biscuit who never
wrote that “love is a bubble blown in the heart”
in his second novel Holding Fruit for Annabelle.
I make such allusions to be certain of myself,
to sure my mind against a world in which faces
go rotten and the untied ends of sentences
never spoken, make no safe connection,
but paddle in the dark and are quickly forgotten.
Maybe I remind you of the actor Henri Doussin
who fifty years today will get round to saying
“life would be better if we saw ourselves coming,
would fold out more neatly if it were rehearsed”.
My mouth maybe, or because I said it first?
Under
I was picking an apple when it spoke
in worm tongue: youth is busy in you it said
and sure enough my skin greened, a seed-pip
lodged itself in each soft chamber of my pink heart.
Then while turning radishes, one pepper root
buzzed, a moth in my fist: love will redden the veins,
and whiten the fluids I felt it say. Go home.
Wash your hands, for girls cannot be dug at.
I walked the back-lanes where cow parsley dipped
and posed. One sprig I took and held to my nose,
giggled: I am fed on the dead men of your house.
There is fog inside you. I smelled my family name.
Lover, if I am foggish and truly dying, if love
fleshes itself wordily and I am young enough to say,
if blood has taken root and swelled me to a man,
take me home, wash my hands.
And what do you do?
Write codenames, military mainly.
‘Operation blunt-tongue’ that was me,
‘spirit-hat’, ‘yard-mile’ them too.
I’m jacking it in next month:
civvy street, open shirt, slip on shoes.
I’ve a job lined-up in colours.
How about ‘burnt viscose’, ‘black jam’?
Would you paint your hall with ‘easy money’?
These days there’s little left to call.
What beautiful blue eyes you have.
Certain
Nothing before had seemed so potent
and self-contained –
surely the onion was beautiful.
Its hung cloud of acid worked
in his nose and throat
as the knife bisected
like a maker of names passing
between twins, calling one half Perfect
the other also Perfect.