From an Armchair

Beyond the range of the King’s photographer
the forest of the meteorite
and its star of blasted pines;
 
beyond the islands of the Gulag
and the road of bones through endless forest
where winter is norm, lives pass unrecorded,
 
epics unfold their progress in silence,
towns work through unknown narratives –
all outside the great conversation;
 
beneath sky-scapes lashed with stars
and the unfolding green of borealis;
through Sakha, Yakutsk and ice crushed bridges
 
lies Omyakon between frozen mountains,
where they say in winter words freeze
as they leave your mouth to fall forgotten in the snow.
 
They make a tundra littered with gossip,
cries of love, argument and greeting,
speeches and shouts petrified in depths of ice
 
until one midday when larch are greening
and golden root makes a brief smile at the low sun,
words fall into air as if from a door flung open
 
to fill the town like birdsong and running water.
 

Christopher North

shortlisted for the Strokestown Prize, 2016;
in pamphlet collection The Topiary of Passchendaele, 2018, Smith|Doorstop Books,
ISBN 978-1-9121961-1-1

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House

We formed the foundation trenches
in harmony with the golden section.
They were six foot deep and given
a basal layer of hardcore containing
coloured glass from a demolished church.
 
Before concreting we placed a steel box
containing a family bible, photographs and
a recording of us singing ‘Adeste Fideles’
one family Xmas. Also unwittingly buried,
the foremen’s pen and a one pound coin.
 
The strips were filled on a June day
of big clouds and a north-easterly wind.
Wild roses rambled over the raw plot.
The brick walls rose through summer
and internal spaces gradually attained
 
their future character, became an
outside and an inside. In the cavity
a bunch of keys was lost below the foam.
Floors were laid in September, screed to
the kitchen topped with terracotta tiles.
 
Within the screed, the body of a Holly Blue
that had wafted in as cement was drying.
Glazing gave the house eyes, doors opened its soul
and the loft prepared itself for a largely
secret life which included a forgotten chisel.
 
The word ‘Kevin’ was scrawled on a purlin.
In that first year we gradually came to know
the way the light moved through the house,
the curious language of sounds from doors,
floors and the surrounding hawthorns and beech.
 

Christopher North

in pamphlet collection The Topiary of Passchendaele, 2018, Smith|Doorstop Books,
ISBN 978-1-9121961-1-1

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Relleu in Cloud

Awoke and found the village in cloud.
There was the flat shape of the acropolis
but as if it had been cut out and removed.
 
The sierra beyond had been stolen
and below almond trees stood poised
in bland vapour as if uncertain what to do next.
 
Other times we have been above the cloud ocean:
an island in a tide and swirl of other islands,
but this morning, mist had fingered its way up the valley
 
streamed into spaces, grooves, runnels,
occupying them, fading Aleppo pines
from green to grey to ghost.
 
Birds stopped singing, the village became muffled;
it seemed an order had been given
that required the maintenance of silence.
 
We were inside the cloud’s single room.
It presented bland walls, vagueness,
was without edge or corner, gave nothing to hold.
 
The streets were comforting:
they quietly continued their daily round
seemingly unconcerned with their new existence
 
within a cloud floating over an unknown firmament,
maybe crossing over turbulent ocean,
vast tundra or windless, dune haunted deserts.
 
All the streets ended in simple whiteness
where before had hung a worthy portrait
of surrounding sierras in rich and vibrant pastel.
 

Christopher North

first published in Writers’s News, 2013;
in pamphlet collection The Topiary of Passchendaele, 2018, Smith|Doorstop Books,
ISBN 978-1-9121961-1-1

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AK47

You don’t see these much
       in the to-ing and fro-ing of our village.
 
People would recognize them
        from the TV. Men would be easy
 
with the idea of them, small boys too
         but there’s no general aspiration to own one,
 
not in this settled, daily, dull
          baker, fishmonger, corner bar
 
little cluster of routines and lotteries
          that is our village in a peaceful county.
 
Though who knows what is brewing
          behind those expressionless doors?
 
Who knows what is in the mind
         of the youth in the bus shelter, foot juddering?
 
The morning is quiet. People are walking
        towards the market. The day is drunk
 
with normality so this artefact
       is far from people’s minds;
 
would be as strange as a naked woman
    cradling a water-melon as if it was a baby
 
or the old men sitting on the wall
    suddenly rising smartly to attention.
 

Christopher North

published in anthology Hands and Wings, 2015, White Rat Press,
ISBN 978-0-9933964-0-3;
in pamphlet collection The Topiary of Passchendaele, 2018, Smith|Doorstop Books,
ISBN 978-1-9121961-1-1

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