Cow Parsley

Sunlight makes a home here, turns these tall stalks
                  to a May haze. Intricate,
                                after dull warty dock, white foam
 
appearing year on year
                  like half-remembered lines in sleep
 
Gnats, furious after the mild winter
                  swarm above its whiteness, brush my face and hair
 
hoverflies settle on upturned parasols of flower-heads
                  – dipping, quivering details.
 
And I’m alive to its white noise, a cloud
                  which barely stirs in river-breeze
 
a lightness that won’t be cut or kept in vases
                  swathing each side of the towpath on the Thames.
 
I want to run a hand through it, this thickened air.
                  Grasp what it is that makes of love
                                a weed so ordinary and rare.
 

Isabel Bermudez

published in Aesthetica, 2014, ISSN 2048-8777

 
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Agapanthus

Once, after many years of not mentioning that place at all
my mother said, In La Montaña…
 
and she pointed out some flowers in the public park
that had suddenly reminded her of what grew there;
 
as if the past were a blood vessel that had been cauterized,
but the blood flowed back; it could not help itself;
 
the way some things are restored to us at the allotted time,
a carved wooden box of keys to old flats and beat-up cars
 
that always sat under a fading photograph of her father –
white hair, thick spectacles, in a rocking-chair on the verandah –
 
beside that one of her mother – black and white,
a studio profile of the old days.
 
Here they are again, in my mind’s eye,
the keys that are no use to anyone,
 
except perhaps to unlock doors to what is lost to us.
Just as, not remembering those flowers,
 
I call her to ask and she says, La Montaña?
They were tall and blue and they grew all the way up the drive…
 
in midday sun that burnt off mist in the mountains;
their rounded heads full of sky: flores de amor – agapanthus.
 

Isabel Bermudez

in collection Extranjeros, 2015, Flarestack Poets,
ISBN 978-1-906480-42-4

 
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The Scrivener

You made me a quill pen
and we dipped it in ink,
 
you showed me how to
scratch out words
 
with its yellowing
fingernail nib.
 
There might have been
a signature, a flourish,
 
yours perhaps, or mine
I should have kept,
 
somewhere among my things.
Now you perch
 
on the balcony, smoking
in all weathers, your cap
 
in winter, two jackets,
a scarf and gloves,
 
waiting for the visit
of the scrivener
 
whose hunched back
and grey wing
 
extend the branch below;
watching the tide,
 
as if, in fog or November
rain, as that grey
 
smoke meets the January wind,
in-between distorted cries,
 
those strained loudspeaker calls
of trainers to their rowing crews,
 
in a language that was always yours,
you hear the river sing.
 

Isabel Bermudez

published in Agenda web supplement, Summer 2015

 
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January, Mortlake

Girls with tee-shirts have second-guessed the spring,
in a flutter of lipstick and short skirts crowding the bus-stop
on the High Street where three red buses come at once.
It may be over all too soon, as a gust pulls at the buds;
winter is clinging on like a grandmother; hair on her chin,
with holes where her cheeks were, in a long cardigan, not opening the door.
But the year will hold its course and winter slip away; a frozen passing
in plastic carrier bags that clothe the trees down by the brewery,
in scarves, hats, old shoes and gloves washed up on the towpath,
and white gulls on the river that suddenly have the look of new souls.
 

Isabel Bermudez

published in Under the Radar, Sep 2009, ISSN 1758-3357

 
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