Forecasts was written as a collaborative piece. Angus Sinclair, who also completed the Poetry MA, has written a corresponding poem. View his work.
Forecasts
‘We live submerged at the bottom of an
ocean of air’
Eva
ngelista
Torricelli
i.
I am beginning to
realise that you are
the kind of sentence
that doesn’t go anywhere
fast. I have been
tracking the weather forecasts
in France – your mute
winds spook me, enough
to annotate my days
away from silence, deaf-
dumb-blindness of being
left alone with no-one
to narrate the cloudburst,
or the way the
wheat fields in the
morning smell like burning
popcorn. Last night I
read a story aloud
just to hear words
spoken in our house.
It was about a
little girl who wished
she owned a cat.
One afternoon a tiger
landed in her garden
in a wooden crate
destined for the zoo,
and the little girl wanted
a cat so much
she simply believed the
tiger was a cat.
Poor tiger, house-trained,
learning how to purr
for her, he tried
so hard to be
a cat – ignoring trees
and dogs and making
such an effort not
to eat her until
the end. It made
me think of how
much you want to
believe in taming airstreams,
translating storms into a
chorus we can score
in our own voices.
But don’t we always
misread something? Afterwards
I woke myself laughing
into the empty room,
my voice so loose
I was certain it
must have been you –
not so far away
across the sea, not
chasing hurricanes just to
hear if they speak.
vi.
Last night the sky turned white
as a soft-boiled egg, and lightning
marbled the milk skin
red. I saw your eyes, bloodshot
from driving nights round city outskirts,
where the bloodhounds bay over fences
at the slightest interruption,
and inside your cab there is
a constant intermission; agony of stale
air, saliva gumming up from the
cluttered, plastic disposable-cups,
furnishings breathing toxins through your closed
compartment heart. These small storms hit
us hard, but I found that
a whole summer’s rainfall
in an hour can be exhilarating.
I stood in the doorway staring
up until the tungsten clouds broke,
listening to next-door wailing
carly carly where are you carly
come home carly over and over
again beneath the sound of freight-trucks
ploughing miles through the
sky, and I thought I heard
your voice counting down the cats-eyes’
on the motorway. Here the storm
wind booms, gathers its
reverberations back into the cavity of
its own iron moan. The streets
are flooded, full-throttle thunder drenched
the roses you never
even saw bloom, they fattened and
dwarfed in an instant, the way
swollen skies are so suddenly spent,
emptied hissing over doorsteps.
Meanwhile red eyes, channel your paths
through thunder, crack the window, catch
the quick winds in your palm,
fingers streaming through slant
gasps on the other side of
glass. I can only try and fill
this house with sounds you missed,
a box of storms,
sheet-metal compressed and furious.
viii.
The house is beginning
again to dust
and I am allowing
the bruised fruit to
soften. All we can hope
for since the storm
is something more to stir
us. I give you
hints; a jackdaw clack,
photographs we
ought to remember for
each other; blue
balloon in a grey-green
river, the girl
who. I know you told me
not to but I
went swimming in the lake
last night. It was
a struggle, as
soon as I got far enough
I wanted to
turn back, but it was a
song I had to
finish, there were little
fish and raindrops
flinched against the surface
like scattered
rice. I wanted to be
so completely
wet I couldn’t hear. I
held my breath and
counted my lungs in my
fists; blood rustled
like static, a needle
snagged on a scratch,
the way we catch our breath
on hairline splits
between us and return
always to memories –
I remember
I wanted you to jump
from the rock face,
watched you watching the local
boys who knew
instinctively where to
climb, where to aim
for in the water – I
held my breath for
you then, watching sunlight
creep up carving
edges onto everything,
clarity given
back in a flock of leaves
appearing here
here again, interspersed
with breathlessness.
And later, our cool white
room whose windows
opened out onto the
red-tiled terrace
where the other guests smoked
and drank home-made
brandy out of foot-less
glasses, we held
our silence in our throats
behind the thin
cotton curtains, sweating
in the storm of
each other.
ix.
The sprig you stole
from the plantation garden has produced
leathery flowers that reek of jasmine,
but are not that.
The bush is breaking
apart the patio, the purpled florets
hook newly-hatched spiders in their flight
out of the garden.
How easily they lift
into the wind and clot their
own nests in the forest, how
easily wind can take
into itself something so
delicate and pass it on, until
completely stitched into the fabric of
our distances. How light
the air is tonight.
I dip my body in itself,
hoping something tender reaches through the
wind spinning nets across
the fields, touches you
composing loops and curves between us,
breathing in the air, the scent
of jasmine, misremembered skin.
