poetry pRO
The White Boat
Katherine Gallagher, free download at CLP
ppf SHOP ONLINE
MEMBERS’ EVENTS
MEMBERS’ COMPS & CALLS May25: Frogmore Poetry Prize
see/hear: listen to Margaret Eddershaw reading her poem The Mission
I have marked a doorway “vision”
on a map of my house. I’ve named
rooms
‘people’ and ‘nature’, ‘apples’
and ‘light’. I can tell you
there’s no guttering here:
there’s nothing to guide
the rain away, nothing
to catch leaves from trees that on my map
are the names
of windows.
And because of this, I’ve no sense of roof,
of capping off.
Images fill my landing,
squeeze under doors I didn’t name –
there must be
space between some rooms
that poetry can’t occupy.
And if a room is full of ‘questions’ or ‘blind’, ‘fusing’
or ‘slow’, who could think
of a channel to trap them,
a roof to cap them off, when ‘questions’
and ‘blind’, when ‘apples’ and ‘song’
know outside these walls there is ‘grass’,
and ‘deep’ and ‘sky’?