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A Plate of Spaghetti               History

         Laurel           1956

 

A Plate of Spaghetti

 

These are the wide, incredulous eyes of Harpo Marx,

handed a plate which will soon be filled

with the tangled cordage of fresh spaghetti.

 

They speak of astonishment at such reversals

when the out-of-luck come into their own

and the least they can do is eat up.

 

The post-prandial concert is inevitable.

They are singing after supper their only song:

We have only our talent and our hunger to give you;

 

We are the century's displaced, the scuttling survivors

who seem to travel light but whose baggage

is weightier than any braced trunk deep in the hold.

 

 

Nicholas Murray

first published Thumbscrew No 4 Spring 1996
in collection The Narrators,Jan 06, The Rack Press
ISBN 0-9527217-1-0 / 978-0-9527217-1-0

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History

 

Elle avait eu, comme une autre, son histoire d'amour - Flaubert

 

The tall girl from Kildare,

I imagine you among horses and wide fields,

having taken the fence you faltered at,

marrying your man with the stubbled chin

and the slow, gentle smile.

On our bar stools, just the two of us,

like an emblem of innocence and experience,

we rehearsed your story: dismantled dreams

when his car left the country road

and your heart, untenanted, searching,

came to ask itself if happiness was the four walls

of a good man's house who would not survive you.

 

On a lift into town, he stopped at a barley field,

waded out like a fisherman in shallow seas,

to stare at the blank horizon as if a message

were posted for his attention,

and came back to the Land Rover, saying nothing.

 

Our game of tennis at dusk, the lost ball we foraged for

in the long grass where our hands brushed lightly

and you turned away, saying nothing.

 

Do you rule now a flagged kitchen

in a big house among fields,

or do you trim the plant of a single life

with expert fingers, sheathed in a green glove?

 

Nicholas Murray

first published Metre, No 2 Spring 1997
in collection The Narrators,Jan 06, The Rack Press
ISBN 0-9527217-1-0 / 978 -0-9527217-1-0

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Laurel

 

How Daphne might have felt

as she ran from the breathy Apollo

(before her skin was bark, her feet roots,

her arms boughs in wild semaphore,

her fingernails the bitter leaf

destined for a victor’s crown)

I felt in that nightmare of pursuit

one is always destined to wake from.

 

 

Nicholas Murray

first published Oxford Poetry , March 1999
in collection The Narrators,Jan 06, The Rack Press
ISBN 0-9527217-1-0 / 978 -0-9527217-1-0

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1956

 

The Russians, it may be, are crushing dissent.

In Kuala Lumpur they are gaining merdeka.

But in this kitchen my mother is shaking flour

from a grey dispenser to her pastry board

and in the garden there are rows of currant,

gooseberry, and the knobbly branches

of an apple tree, whose fat, peeled fruit

cools in a pan while the pastry is rolled.

Suburban England hears only the bee

as it enters the kitchen to fly through the house

with the soft drone of a biplane in a blue sky.

 

Nicholas Murray

first published Thumbscrew , No 15 Winter 2000
in collection The Narrators,Jan 06, The Rack Press
ISBN 0-9527217-1-0 / 978-0-9527217-1-0

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