A rural symposium

‘Aye,’ he said, shifting
his weight
on to the other elbow,
heavy as a sack
of spuds.
 
Silence.
 
‘Aye,’ came in answer
from the other,
looking beyond
the optics
and his mirrored self.
 
Silence.
 
A sup of beer.
A check of fob-watch
against bar clock.
 
‘Aye,’ said either,
confident in their confederacy,
unspoken understanding
of the seasons,
vicissitudes of harvests,
how cattle fare,
the loneliness of turning land.
 
‘Aye.’
 

Malcolm Carson

in collection The Where and When, 2019, Shoestring Press,
ISBN 978-1-9125243-1-0

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Where the Gelt gathers

Where the Gelt gathers here on broken fell,
forgotten except by those who maunder
 
along tracks of mines and hillsides pocked
with waste heaps, I come among
 
wild cattle whose gaze you’d best avoid,
the startled snipe and startling grouse.
 
No chance of dramatic view, tasteful panorama:
just the fellsides shifting colour as you watch,
 
catch breath, run on. You might though
be amazed by kingfishers’ embroidered seam
 
along the wooded gill, or harrier’s doomed flight.
Yet all the time the Gelt is swelling, drawing
 
mists, storms, dew, and even sweat through turf and bog,
sieving age and aspiration as it sees fit.
 

Malcolm Carson

in collection The Where and When, 2019, Shoestring Press,
ISBN 978-1-9125243-1-0

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Deuce

She would never have imagined she’d fall for him,
not in a million years, and when she did
 
her friends were agog. ‘How can you? He’s so dull!
Worthy, yes, but dull. And solid.’
 
‘I know,’ she said, ‘but I love him. And dullness
isn’t a bad thing in a good man, and
 
he is a good man.’ So, dazzled by
his dullness, she took him as her love, leaving
 
a gawping society, tennis racquets dangling,
bewildered, while she exulted,
he dully, duly, was delighted.
 

Malcolm Carson

in collection The Where and When, 2019, Shoestring Press,
ISBN 978-1-9125243-1-0

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Chez Popoff

Une nouvelle vague de beatniks
was how we read of ourselves,
squatting on the pavement,
backs to Popoff’s, rue de la Huchette.
This was all I could have dreamed of,
had read about. Taken in
by this Russian émigré, we sat around
spending as little as we could,
stored much in memories,
talked of Sartre, poetry, jazz:
too easy to parody now.
Hughes and Gunn in my pocket,
I felt parochial. So did Al;
I caught him at the Gare du Nord,
boarding the train for Cleethorpes.
 

Malcolm Carson

first published in Great River Review, Fall/Winter 2012,
Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Minnesota, USA;
in collection, Cleethorpes Comes to Paris, 2014, Shoestring Press,
ISBN 978-1-9073566-0-5

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