| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
Terry Lucas (BardOne1) VIBRATO Guy Kettelhack (GuyBlakeKett) Laura J. Cunningham (Pitchfork)FIRST WATCH
If I sit perfectly still, how will I tell
the starboard from the port
of tomorrow? In the dark,
I believe in the red and purple fists
of the four-o’clocks, the midwatch
of my mother’s coffee pot, the stories
that bubble up the metal throat
and sob their way through the curved glass
of her lips, swollen with memory of the blaze.
If I ask her how she stays up for the eclipse
of my father, her answer is the sound of a mother
wren, pushing its young from the nest,
depending on the metal flecks in the bone
to line up with true north, like iron shavings
on a page gather around the poles of a magnet
below the surface. Which way do I go? North or farther
into my father? If I sit perfectly still
on the lip of the crow’s nest, will I hear his fist clenching
before it strikes the bell and sounds the alarm
for us all? I ask my mother again,
when will the watch end? I listen for the sound of metal
in the bone, I hear the water start to whisper,
bargaining with the blue flame below the surface,
somewhere off the starboard, or is it
the four-o’clocks?
Shells of ears form on us very early in the womb: but when,
I wonder, do we start to hear? Five months into the trek
toward birth? If so, by January 1951 I’d first have heard his
baritone, and surely sucked it up like serum through my
infant otic bones. Involuntary, artless, serendipitously
sweet: my father’s voice poured from his throat as if it
couldn’t not. Its plummy rhythmic float acquainted me
in utero with all I’d later learn I’d really want to know.
I started violin at nine, pursuing it so I could find the secret in
my father’s tone: by twelve, through years of strangling the
fiddle-bone, I finally had the plum in hand. I’d something
else in hand as well: the practice of this fingered swell
and whap proved useful elsewhere -- in my lap. The thought
at first perplexed: vibrato had to do with sex. I had the suavest
tremolo on polished wood! -- I doubt my father knew why my cupped
hand had suddenly become so good. These Oedipal vibrations
marked our parting. I found new modes of music, more appropriate
for me. Four decades passed, then Alzheimers began to separate my
father from himself. When I returned and found he couldn’t think or
speak, I worried that his music might have similarly leaked away.
I sang: he brightened like an infant, sang right back. I heard the muffled
sweetness I’d first felt when I was little more than splitting cells. Its
ripple was the flow of blood between us. We harmonized because we
had no choice. He died, and now I find I almost have my father’s voice.
SKIN SPLASH
“After shave revitalising skin splash”
It may allow my brother to cut a dash
With the ID free locals,
Cheap trash impressed with a student.
20 old, flash.
But my dad is not so easily bought.
I guess it’s the difference
In the way they were brought up.
My dad was always taught
That soap is for ‘tarts.’
I think he thought for himself
Those days anyway.
Understood that clean does not mean gay
Or a girl.
He’s just not willing to pay
For some branded bottle of bouquet
That smells like cat piss.
I’m with him.
I dismiss those men who find
Ultimate bliss in the bathroom mirror,
Who kiss their own reflections good night.
Look only for the rays of light
In their own smiles.
Excite themselves alone.
It’s quite right--
What’s inside is what counts.
But this theory amounts to nothing to them.
So in protest I renounce
Every boy and girl who chooses to flounce.
MORE ABOUT THE IBPC...
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Poems entered from About Poetry Forum, 2001
