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last update: 12th Feb 14

 

 

Melancholia 1                      White Wife

 

Belongings                      Barbers

 

Melancholia 1

     Albrecht Durer records in his diary that during his travels in the Low Countries,
     he often gave away a pair of prints: ‘St. Jerome in his study’ and ‘Melancolia 1’.

 
He had stopped me on the quay. Throwing caution
to Antwerp’s dissemblers and bawds, I thought
what harm could come of an old man doing
my portrait? There was time for my mug to get
touched up and topped up with ale. Taking the board
that the lass brought drinks on, he fixed paper to it
and set to with charcoal sticks.
 
His eyes roved among faces at the tables,
then stared at me wistfully, as if drawing
from the inside. He wouldn’t show me
but, on parting, gave me two scrolls.
I put them away where I could safely forget.
Yesterday, when the black humour and nagging came,
I found them, as if I was meant to: the prints.
 
One calmed me: a room somewhere is caught in a burst
of sunlight, light that etches a halo for a man
at his letters. Everything stops as if the moment
were blessed. By his desk, a lion dozes, a wolf
catnaps. On the window sill a skull holds back
on its wake up call; death can wait until
the snoozing is done, till the ink is dry.
 
As for the other, I wish I hadn’t
met the earthbound angel; we are as alike
in our puzzlement. Even with the tools to hand,
we cannot make what we will of the world;
dogs starve as the cherub scribbles our failings.
The sand in the hour glass petrifies,
and acid etched futility numbs.
 
There is ladder propped against the heavens,
off-print; I’m minded of a ladder fixed against
the quay, and stepping down to the leaking
wreck. The boatman who punts the Ship of Fools,
greets me, stashes my knapsack of lost days;
from the prow, I consider my portrait
drawing through the dark swirling water.
 

Bruce Barnes

Winner of the Torriano Poetry Competition, 2008;
published in Brittle Star, Issue 22



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White Wife

     There is a she-ghost on the island of Unst, the Shetlands,
     who appears in cars driven by single men.

 
I was sober
going for my usual nowhere,
northwards, to the old ends of the Earth,
both headlights taking the piss, sleet clonking
the windscreen, like filling a glass.
Another kennel of a night with the black dog
stinking things rotten and biting my head off,
( I swear that he won’t, but he does).
She was on the road, leaning hard
into that dark, tugging the car to her,
hand over hand along the light beam,
but quick as you like, she was inside,
the boozy talk of Unst fixing her
as White Wife, then taking a front seat.
( I have to laugh now at the ‘wife’ tag,
how it works both ways, leaving her easy
but with my ring on her finger). By Christ,
that face was white, white as a pillowcase.
She looked up at me and yawned, maybe
from pleasure, as her lips then blew a kiss.
The breath reeked: it was of more rottenness,
of barley, mouldy from the Flood, of charred
long dead yeast. But the intimacy
in the shape of her mouth held me:
 
I remembered an evening dance,
fiddle on my shoulder, staring down
the ‘f’ hole, the bow quick shovelling
the rosin smell that was a soothing balm.
Folk stopped to listen as a tale
turned on its head; she could never sing
but tempted and temptress did the music,
hers and my tune slowly pushed the boats out,
on a better night than this one,
to set men dancing on a silvery voe.
 

Bruce Barnes

Third Prize winner,The Plough Prize , 2004



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Belongings

Hardly have we set off, when there’s the voice,
male and decisive, with an inflexion
of jollying along. “The next stop is Leeds
Please take all your belongings with you&rdqo;.
I understand the thinking behind it;
travel displaces the mind, leaves the routines
of wallets, keys, and umbrella days waiting
in a siding. The journey time is enough
to the next unspecified stop, to recollect
belongings that I would be pleased to take.
 
There is a triangle of land formed
by the railway lines, a small holding
on it with improvised shed, water butt
and vegetable patch. Not much is happening.
The gate is off; there are plenty of docks.
I belong to places like this.
Given someone shovel-handed, I would have
its resolute spirit, of little to do
but schemes to play with, set beside me.
The voice again, but further off this time:
 
“Take pleasure in all that belongs to you.”
The next stop is a British Museum case
with a spindly terracotta boat adrift
between Abyssinian and Egyptian,
I can’t remember from where it was taken.
I covet its clean earth-bound line, the orange
restraint, a simple utility
that won’t float in the bath of paradise.
My eyes squint at the sun soaked deck, and see
her through the other world of long corridors.
 
The grave robber breaks the seals, the tunnel
opens to reveal the start of Leeds:
an empty factory yard, a public house
on its own and cosseted, as if meant
for an after-life. My seat catches the back
of my hand; I am leaving jacquard moquette,
with purple chevrons to boss an army
of blue dots; I ought to take that before
the dog inconsolably howls, and lights
inexplicably go out.
 

Bruce Barnes

Second Prize, Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition, 2002;
in collection Somewhere Else, 2003, Utistugu Press



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Barbers

I watch his hands, an energy of fingers
that welds him to his scissors, and I think
of past barbers in their clipping handfuls:
 
the last, a squat Italian, snipping
in North London who spoke, as this one does,
an Esperanto of haircuts, with numbers
tidying up the hairy nouns; “You want the one”,
for a little left on, or “Zero, yes?”
for follicles and their nothingness.
 
He had a poster of Roma and one for Spurs,
layered in crew cut turf, with Ginola,
a Samson among the shorn Philistines.
 
Mr Hussain motions to the chair.
Falling into his arms is like the old game
of trust. There’s a hair’s breadth moment, that hangs,
light and airborne, slowing in the dust
beneath a white rumpled sheet.
I could be anywhere:
 
outside in some crowded piazza, scalped,
and the skull’s blood crying; “Perche mi scerpi ?
Non hai tu spirito di pietade alcuno?” *,
 
or in another Jahangir Saloon,
with my mop of hair sticky in Mirpur’s heat.
As someone else is getting done, I wait
on a cane chair, staring at two photos
tacked to a mud brick wall. They gel.
One holds in place a crying child
 
shrunk by the the barber’s chair he’s caught in.
He clings to a toy ambulance.
No help will come.
 
The other has a quiff and I wonder
how I know that face. He is a haircut
more than my doppelganger’s. A scented
profile slips out of the chair, lets the door to.
He doesn’t tip, but leaves a dust trail
shimmering in the street of barbers…..
 
It’s all come off; the untidy locks,
the unreachable wisps at the back
of the neck, are carpeting my toe-caps.
 
Mr Hussain holds up a hand glass
and does his infinity trick, ‘just like that’,
the mirror steadying an endlessness
of ruler straight nape, and beyond me,
in perpetuity, plastic flowers
flashing in their dry vase.
 
It’s o.k., I nod, doing some mental
arithmetic. Mr Hussain doesn’t have
a price list. So, what would I pay myself ….
 
to be here, with other men’s hairstyles
and the packet of me for the weekend,
in the mid morning sun streaming,
bouncing off the tiles in an Oak Lane shop.
I reckon three or four quid….
three being lucky and four’s a leg to stand on.
 
 
 
 
* From Dante’s Inferno: “Why do you tear at me. Have you no sense of pity!”
 
       Canto X111 line35-36.
 

Bruce Barnes

in collection Somewhere Else, 2003, Utistugu Press



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