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all that wild blaze reeling and swooping heel and toe stamp turn about and Goodnight Ladies and oh The Girl I Left Behind Me somewhere out in the forest rough music rising in the year that was becoming the year before 10 New Poetries VI and heard again Watching a nineteenth-century film in the twenty-first century Adolphe, Mrs Whitely and Harriet wait in the garden still in an angle of sunlight that will never fall across the bay window or slice the mottle of summer-weighted shade. They take four steps to turn into the shadows at the edge of their afternoon; four steps wheeling past us – skirts swinging, coats flapping – a breath’s length away as we watch in their dark. Their bodies are a shower of particle-scatter, their footfall a trick of snapshooting time. They flicker to the edge of the frame at twelve frames a second for two seconds for ever through a speckle and grain of sound too distant to reach us: Adolphe counting their steps – and turn – a neighbour’s shout, a laugh, a road beyond the hedge spooling out, out into the smash and roar of the world that’s falling towards us.
page 31
In the jagged months In the jagged months when you lost even lost and knew it, you gave up arguments and grievance – those intricate machines you had built for years, their ratchets kept oiled and sharp to run sweet – and broke glass. Your hand was a wrecking bar smashing ice on a pond, you splintered yourself open to haul down through a mulch of black leaves for what lay in the sump of winter’s slow bruising. You had seen them, bent under four o’clock dark throwing your box in the pond, the box that held your streets, your tools, the white leaves of your books, your days of the Arno – days when green branches swaying upside-down in a pool rose like a promise through the pliant skin of water which opened to your hand, and was whole again. Judith Willson 11

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all that wild blaze reeling and swooping heel and toe stamp turn about and Goodnight Ladies and oh The Girl I Left Behind Me somewhere out in the forest rough music rising in the year that was becoming the year before

10 New Poetries VI and heard again

Watching a nineteenth-century film in the twenty-first century

Adolphe, Mrs Whitely and Harriet wait in the garden still in an angle of sunlight that will never fall across the bay window or slice the mottle of summer-weighted shade.

They take four steps to turn into the shadows at the edge of their afternoon; four steps wheeling past us – skirts swinging, coats flapping – a breath’s length away as we watch in their dark.

Their bodies are a shower of particle-scatter, their footfall a trick of snapshooting time. They flicker to the edge of the frame at twelve frames a second for two seconds for ever through a speckle and grain of sound too distant to reach us: Adolphe counting their steps – and turn –

a neighbour’s shout, a laugh, a road beyond the hedge spooling out, out into the smash and roar of the world that’s falling towards us.

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