David Berridge
Very Thin Ice
In the desert what is
The first thing you
Have to think of
Students the verdict
Comes nothing is
There really a here
There are four greens
One is a green you
Look at all your life
Instead of the teacher
Huge autumn leaves
Looked at individually
Students are not
Settled in explaining
The desert nothing
Obsesses over
We disliked this small town, changed it
By juxtaposing it with another. The explanation
In the style of a military performance
But we found it enabled gestures
Tore page or canvas. To be born
In the intention was to contemplate
Leaving and returning the city
There was a limit to the effects of
Juxtaposition. New arrivals all had perfect
Teeth. Just because we went
To the neighbouring town, gap-toothed
Clamouring for fillings
Was not to make it worthwhile, beans
Try square after square
In the town of intention we hide
In the town of forced calm our
Passivity revealed as a sham we
Betrayal in the night thought bound
By the question where to live not
On the ticket a field a hedge a
Human scale wood pigeon
He was not at home so I had tea
With many of his favourite maxims
Difficult for such a meeting
Showers of frogs we make a space
In which to work between finger
Tips a micro-climate the space
Of an ice cream cone surely
Cannot mean subsistence
Two hands reached friends
Instead of love and work
Circle, triangle, square
Is not stacking chairs. Impossible, then
To believe this totally. The world seems flat
Our days appear to depend on it. Only leaves
Huge autumn leaves live up to the promise
Are included directly not as influence
But as themselves alongside papers
Preferred for fixity of colour. Leaves
Have many papers in themselves that
To the opaqueness of a single person
Talking fast. A shocking red season
Ends. In the distance a chair stack falls
This coal it
Fills our mouths
At the moment
Of writing
Scares those
Coming back
To score us
For industry
A love gives
Equal priority
To the tree
Behind me
David Berridge lives in London. Poems and sequences can be found in Shearsman, Liminal Pleasures, Poetry Salzburg Review and online in Fascicle, Great Works and Shadow Train. A chapbook Nationality Test, published as part of the 2007 dusi/e-chap kollectiv, can be downloaded at dusie.org.