Simon Smith
Letter, Yesterday’s: with a Poem Attached by Paul Blackburn, & my Entry for the Day Before Yesterday
email takes the place of my letters today
today’s entry is reflection
& daily account
to cheer you along
yes, Evan clicked at keys & stops in step to the mouthings
Matt sampled then re-processed
as David & I
spoke line into line
each layer broadcast above
the other cut
my nose shaving invisible
beneath my left nostril
sore with the cologne, this morning
stings recall
Joshua Tree, Split Rock, the exit for Palm Springs
the downpour as we skimmed Riverside
Paul Blackburn wrote the desert –
‘Along the San Andreas Fault’
The neon donuts blink . Other
side of the mountains / yr in the desert . Here
you really know it . Barry
Goldwater, Jr. is Congressman
these are his people .
lines & stanzas
hang mobile
hang-gliders in air on electronic
ether
the immense
& silent S P A C E S
between
us
a very personal poem
to drop
kisses into
browsing data & love
Rain
RAIN RAIN RAIN the May
blossom beaten into the earth, no Ezra
Pound about to transcend the experience
with a nuclear
alchemy, no Métro, no wet
black bough, no faces
only petals, simple pink-blue petals beaten, muddy petals
Monday’s Blues
Bank Holiday best sat out.
So I sit it out. Then what?
Bills, road tax the car, renew my driver’s licence – fail
online: – announce Feedback on Facebook to virtual
& real underwhelming indifference
Is my ‘star falling’? Did it ever ascend?
Quick recce to the supermarket. Bath. Radio 4. Skype down
Dot gone & her mother
I can hear
but not see her
she can see me
behind a blank wall of 6,500 miles the virtual collapses the real
info into deception
a crow passing right past my bedroom window right there it was
sounds like a dog sounds like a cat sounds like a crow
in the end sounds like a crow crow Doppler effect
the moon passed the Earth closest tonight, since when a big mooning face of a moon
at the empty bedroom
window
‘FULLSET £10’
the sign sez
there’s a dip in the weather (overcast, humid) sunny by four, freshened
scouring S.E. London for somewhere
to dwell, Forest
Hill, Deptford (ghost of Kit Marlowe, violence to the geography – a myth
tobacco-smoking, atheist, pederast
unmarked grave four hundred & nineteen years ago yesterday marks
the occasion, ‘great reckoning in a little room’
Surrey Quays, Rotherhithe
history of a river, source, origin
snakes between quays, tower blocks, cottages, power
house to Empire – long gone
the traffic heavy / slow along Lower Street, the neatly
manicured rose-beds of council estates
block after block of low-rise to the river front & docks –
now marina tow path given over to cycle ways & pedestrian ginnel
Plough Way SE8 somewhere possible
checking in the day in free-form
first glass of Côtes du Rhône at six – served at room temperature
Begin Again
late morning in bed
reading / looking at Begin Again
surprise & delight at how you are made
of numerous portraits, a stranger to others
but the construct ‘you’ conjures your presence
the day I gave up drinking today
today & a walk abroad past the Orange Café
up Telegraph Hill Upper Park, across
Drakefell & the railway footbridge
along St Asaph’s and Linden Grove
to enact our return over & over
talking talking talking
where do we live? what do we inhabit?
what place // language the place of habitation
then to the supermarket, guess at what we might eat
a little chicken with pancetta, a cold glass of Badoit
Liz appears for tea sit out in the garden
where are we going /
to live
kicked into the long grass alongside the 12K from ma & pa
Simon Smith is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Kent. Part of his entry in The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry, edited by Ian Hamilton and Jeremy Noel-Tod reads, ‘Reverdy Road and Mercury are book-length sequences of short, epigrammatic lyrics which pick up and redistribute the language and life-world of modern London with a Raworthian lightness.’ The Fortnightly Review and The Los Angeles Review of Books have carried essays on his work. Shearsman Books will publish More Flowers Than You Could Possibly Carry: Selected Poems 1989-2012, edited and introduced by Barry Schwabsky, in 2016. Salon Noir, a new book of poems, recently appeared from Equipage.