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Life on the Road to Santa Fe               The Man on Crewe Station

         Glider           A Pound of Flesh

 

Life on the Road to Santa Fe

 

The highway south gives straight new meaning,

and nothing prepared you for this being

half way from somewhere to somewhere else

and so far from anywhere.

 

The last town was like all the others—a lurid

mile of burger joints and motels—and that clown

in the big rig, leeching your rear fender,

pulled in for diesel and coffee way back.

 

Passing the first cactus your eyes flick

to the gas gauge, seeking reassurance, sweep

miles of sagebrush for other vehicles—

 

there are none; for now the future

is all telephone poles and yellow coneflowers

bobbing by the road and distant mountains

never getting any nearer.

 

But by afternoon you’re in the mountains;

on the dirt-road a curl of red dust clings

like a bad reputation. After the third pass

the plain’s heat reaches up once more

 

and, back amongst desert scrub and mesas,

the radio’s talking Navajo and all you understand

is Taco Bell and Kwik-Lube.

 

It’s late, and getting later, but the road

insists; the windshield’s dusty now, you’re almost

off the map; then, in low sun, the first adobe houses

melt out of a hillside—adobe, the colour

 

of earth, of dried blood, the colour of landscape—

while in the mirror, blacktop reels out behind

towards successive rows of mountains:

brown, then blue, then grey, then only sky.

 

John Godfrey

published in Fatchance no. 4, March 1994

and in Replaying the Echo, Rockingham Press, 1995

ISBN 1 873468 41 5

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The Man on Crewe Station

 

watches departing trains

unpick the silver tangle of rails;

he notices the slow binary of tail-lights

as coaches wag through pointwork:

right then left; yes and no; wrong or right?

 

He has handed in the mobile phone,

the pager, the keys to the red Peugeot;

in the Admin. Office he handed in his life

to the girl with green finger-nails

who’ll file and forget.

 

What started here is finishing here—he

could never have predicted that

nearly thirty years ago—and yet he’s sure

he was never precisely here

before, not where he finds himself now.

 

There were nights far away—in trains,

on stations, tramping the length

of snow-covered yards sliced by a north wind

that pummelled windows in the cabin—

when he’d wondered where the journey

 

was taking him. Like the model engine

in a train-set he has chased

down tracks, round curves, been stopped

by signals, shunted into sidings, but thought

he was generally headed somewhere

 

only to find that somewhere is back here.

Last night he dined with colleagues

round the table; this morning,

in a hotel lobby, the circle closed and he

was left outside. It has all the inevitability

 

of a film ratcheting towards its final scene,

the actor caught in tight close-up behind

rising credits; and should the camera

pull back at any time during the six minutes

he waits here for the train home,

 

place him in context, frame him

on the platform among this swelling crowd,

no matter how wide the angle,

the lens would always find him—

for those six minutes—utterly alone.

 

John Godfrey

First Prize in the Peterloo Poets Competition, 2005

published in Peterloo competition anthology, 2005

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Glider

 

A reluctant dog, stretching the lead taut,

it lags behind the tow-plane

clambering through the tiers of air

over Dunstable Down.

 

When unleashed it pauses, pivots, puts out

a wingtip like a steadying hand

to regain balance, then grabs a thermal,

treads an unseen high-wire round

 

a tight helix, teetering higher, never quite

falling off.   At last it spills

willingly from the edge of rising heat,

dives at the speed of a kestrel’s

 

plunge on to prey, only to change its mind,

flick upwards, clawing height

from dwindling lift as momentum falters.

Its pilot surfs sky, afloat

 

on the hill’s updraught and the wind

curving over sculpted fibreglass

until, drawn irresistibly to ground,

he approaches the field; but above the grass

 

his craft hesitates, stays buoyant, clings

briefly to those last few feet of altitude, loath

to be re-joined to its shadow, become

inanimate once more on the earth.

 

John Godfrey

Second Prize in the Ver Poets Open Competition, 2001

published in Vision On 2001, Ver Competition anthology

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A Pound of Flesh

       (selected scenes from the movie of the same name)

 

No gentle rain from heaven but a clear blue sky, just as in

Manhattan three mornings earlier; the same feeling of unreality,

too, and that sensation of being felled, of also having been

on the trajectory of something not seen coming.

 

That’s scene one, in which they’re returning homewards

on a country lane—not much dialogue here—and everything

outside the car so visibly unchanged, conspiring to be

exactly the same as usual, so unrepentantly normal.

 

In the second scene our heroine—for it is she—is on

a trolley being wheeled down a long white corridor while he

watches in silence, a bit-part player for the moment,

wishing the bloody director would cut that swelling music.

 

There’s nudity in scene three—essential to the plot—and she

accepted this when pitched into the part.   She’s in the bath;

a glimpse of fading scars, left side, inner quadrant:

in truth, less than a pound—but still closest to the heart.

 

John Godfrey

shortlisted for The Frogmore Poetry Prize, 2002

published in The Frogmore Papers, no. 60, Autumn 2002

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