Tony Williams
A NAP AFTER LAXNESS
To lie down on the cliff
a spotted handkerchief
and fall to daisies’ sleep
by a gull-spun slip
and crash through sleeping’s sneeze
and by the sky to reach
the bright cloud Claudette
The smocked nurses watch
the snoring faller pass
with teaset eye and beak
a nib dipped to set
the secret rubric out
how things could be
one leaping morning for
the boy and Claudette
The gospel of the drop
which teaches love
from stone’s height to stone
memorial beneath
the ice anointing sea
which squeezes sleep
to snuff however good
the dream and by its lurch
wake the waistcoat and
the girl in daylight’s breeze
a single tear and voice
that glisters through the calls
of gulls beside the cliff
asking for the gift
of sleep: Claudette, Claudette
INN/ÚT
Snæfellsnes
a new loop each fallen snow
each trace of steps the cold lap
of a road against the shore
the craned towns and sea hulls
oil tanks and straight by shells
sky’s strand wrack salt tongues
the petrol gauge the black
teeth of bays the same face
the sheer rock behind each bend
on a new page blind gulls
unlist the days the still dusk
that ends and will not end
all set to crush not close our eyes
till inn they say gives way to út
the page a ruined steading ends
the rockfall roads deny and time
drowns in a black-haired bay
and sleeps the gravel road and snow
cold stone and daydark dreams
the draughting of this rock
against the sky as the car goes
past ascensions flat an only town
lit up the wharf insisting on
and in this sea the planes
whose trails die in mountain snow
the skylit clock till whiting out
the dark and dreamings cease and stop
AM 471 4to
a MS. containing the Saga of the People of Kjalernes
the wooden boards shuttered
windows on all Kjalernes
the widow’s leathern tale
buckling the pink calf
hayfield staggering
a cellar closed a hand
on a spare sheaf
a ring of stones the little
store of corn that grows
on ocean admonished earth
not what was worth
from the burning hall
but what they could
while patient spears wait
beyond the doors
like easy words what
lay to hand they took
from a ring of stones leaving
the rest of love and them
in a black scar of turf
when the turf’s gone
with every glance of warmth
what stern unsaying
hides ashamed
in the vellum’s crease
RIDING AT STÓRI KAMBAR
thunk down on to
the gravel road
one last bonbon
looking back
the jökull’s rocky slope
a rusted MAERSK of tack
the foss-stitched crest
of a stone wave
troll’s moccasin
helped on and off
small horses cut
the black sand braid
moving by tölt
towards the sky and lunch
Copyright © Tony Williams 2016
Tony Williams’s most recent collection is The Midlands (Nine Arches Press, 2014). His outsider art sequence All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head (Nine Arches Press, 2011) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. He teaches creative Writing at Northumbria University, where he is currently researching Icelandic saga and landscape.
