John Goodby
THUNDER
The attic inkwells running warm
Weights for her paper, hemispheres
Small
Small the threads
Birch cries over the grass, spinning
Apron I sat on, white wicker, watching the weather.
Like a nosegay under us away from each other.
SMALL
Church faces smiled on another mouth
Across the entrance smell the closing screen
Appear as wires and car shop signs
And heels in the girl down the hill, black
Girl with her back to me. Why is all there is
A few miles off the highway? Couldn’t it
Divide into languid bare feet in the five-and-ten,
Dawn across my dream pulling in a young deer
To the very edge, to the first
Blue fir trees, out there?
PUDDING
One way misses. Mittens seem effortless
Against rock, states of shade, fold in
To bring the grandmother’s ooze with
The Atlantic in it out of control -
Barn the blurred everywhere your black
Branches. The roads are impassable.
RATIONS
How eagerly spiny they are transparent too.
They queue for seems and seems, opening and descending.
The great ocean drop rolling agreeable, borne in.
And feelingly is the main thing where autumn tumbles.
‘Come home! Come home!’, bare, cold, slower.
Clean to the depth where the heart can stand higher.
Copyright © John Goodby 2017
John Goodby lectures at the University of Swansea. He is the author of The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (2013), and edited the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (2014). He has published translations into English of Heinrich Heine, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pierre Reverdy and the Algerian poet Adel Soleïman Guèmar (with Tom Cheesman), and of Irish women poets into Spanish as No Soy Tu Musa (2008, with Carlota Caulfield). His own books of poetry include uncaged sea (2007), Illennium (Shearsman 2010), and A True Prize (Cinnamon 2011), and The No Breath (Red Ceilings Press 2017), which includes the poems here.