The General

A day spent marking time.
He boils eggs for supper,
cuts her toast into soldiers,
flashes back to the desert
and his men sizzling eggs
on the bonnet of a jeep.
 
I am trained to kill, he thinks,
trying to still the hand
that flutters like a captive bird.
They are in enemy territory
and he knows the campaign
is pretty advanced.
 
There are daily skirmishes:
he hates the sodden sheets,
food wide of the target, her
snail’s pace across the floor;
she hates to see him fretting,
confined to barracks.
 
Darkness has crept up on them.
Always a man of action,
he washes her face and hands
with a warm flannel, then
opens the window to let in
the soft evening air.
 
In the border the tall perennials
are marching towards night.
He longs for the desert sky,
the glittering stars like flames
he could reach out and snuff
between finger and thumb.
 

Elisabeth Rowe

published in collection, Thin Ice, 2010, Oversteps Books,
ISBN 978-1-906856-15-1

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Nightriders (Norwegian Snowmobile Touring Club)

Hardangervidda midnight:
glittering stars ghosted the smooth brow
of the mountain; pale ice muscled and creaked
beneath our sledge as we rode bucking
and swerving over the lake,
cold to the very bone.
 
The hut was a planet among pinpricks.
Dead of night: we sank into bunks, dead weight;
but a slow thunder like impending doom
invaded our black oblivion,
Thor’s hammer on a hundred anvils
plundering the silence.
 
Helmeted giants, bulked out
in black leather jackets, boots and gauntlets,
circled the hut astride a fleet of gleaming
metal long-ships, goggles a-glint,
headlamps slashing the night.
 
Their revels harried me through shifting veils
of sleep and rage: greybeards
and huge boys singing and drinking
in the frozen yard, and a pale-faced girl
who lifted her visor to gulp stars.
I swore I hadn’t slept a wink
when I woke to the muffled solace of white,
discovered snow had erased all traces
of the night riders.
 
Hardangervidda daylight:
out on the fells reindeer scattered like twigs.
Fumbling a snowplough down the rutted track,
skis akimbo, I listened for the chime of ice,
for Norsemen raiders riding on the wind,
clashing in the clefts and gullies of the mountain,
deafening the white skies where morning
rode pillion to a crazy night.
 

Elisabeth Rowe

published in collection, Thin Ice, 2010, Oversteps Books,
ISBN 978-1-906856-15-1

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Morning

Waking at first light
I notice with surprise
that you have grown old:
beneath your bluish pale
transparent skin
I see the skull
tightening its grip;
your breath
comes so thinly
I think you are dead.
 
I press the lobe of your ear
until you stir
then leave you
in the cluttered dreams
that come at dawn;
outside the window
roses have turned to paper
overnight; a bird
scatters the same notes
again and again.
 
I listen to the strong pulse
of the earth,
learn the fluidity
of things, how nothing
holds to its proportion:
the song of a thrush
filling the morning
right to its edge;
love shrinking to a small
tight knot of fear.
 

Elisabeth Rowe

published in anthology, Cracking On, 2009, Grey Hen Press,
ISBN 978-0-9552952-4-9

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Soul Mates

Slim intelligent linguistic pedant
W L T M (would like to meet)
person of similar endangered species
to share fun times and poss l t r’ship;
someone incapable
of ending a sentence with a preposition
mangling the past tense of the verb ‘to lay’
or saying different than:
someone up with whom I should not easily become fed.
 
Old fashioned profess grad grammarian
W L T M (would like to meet)
someone with similar passionate interest
in serious sentence analysis and parsing.
Someone compatible
to eschew estuary accent and exchange
tender linguistic care:
someone for whom correctness is something on by which
he or she can easily become turned
 
Stylish affectionate linguistic purist
W L T M (would like to meet)
person to share good times in ivory tower
and experiment with subordinate clauses.
Someone prepared to
tolerate all my subjunctive moods,
abjure all bastard American spellings
and on a desert island choose the Bible,
Shakespeare and Fowler’s Use of English
 
Pun-loving athletic linguistic rhetorician
W L T M (would like to meet)
person for whom romance denotes
an etymological origin.
Someone devoted to
the music of colon and semi-colon;
who, when the captain of the sinking ship
cries, ‘Every man for themselves!’
feels the need to make kindly corrections
 
Lonely disillusioned linguistic dodo
W H L T M (would have liked to meet)
bubbly attractive articulate stickler
for whom imperfect is merely a tense
but will settle for
anyone with N S O H (no sense of humour)
who will end a sentence with a proposition
to regularly make passionate love with
with a view to f’ ship or just getting lain.
 

Elisabeth Rowe

published in collection, Surface Tension, 2003, Peterloo Poets,
ISBN 1-9043241-0-X

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