Below are two poems from Compass Light, the new collection from Hilary Davies, recently published by Renard Press.
River People
Some of them – have you noticed? – hardly ever
set foot on land; the chug and wash to them
are sweet as lullabies rocking cradles;
I saw one once step up onto a quay, stagger
two long seconds before smashing amongst seagulls.
These barges are roomy as floating sideboards,
all manner of hide-away drawers, fold-down beds
interleaving rockets and latchets.
Occasionally you’ll see dogs, stiff as figureheads,
at the prow; bras, knickers, shirts
semaphoring to the wind.
But aesthetics aren’t neglected:
just count how many gardens of geraniums
and violets swish over the water.
At dusk, you get the best displays of resourcefulness:
everyone here has in his head
whole maps of shallows and rocks and undertow,
even when the galleys are hot
with pepper from salami upriver, different breads,
onions which have been there and back
hung in regattas. At night comes the time of loving
and despair: the water tastes of earth and oil
when you go in it, and there’s always one
who walks to the end in the gorge
where currents are strongest, barely time
to hear the velvet ploosh
before the body’s gone down to the ocean.
There are special places where they make love:
the young do it under the cliffs mostly, the old in port,
and the middle-aged favour the softer reaches
where the land widens down to the sea.
But nothing, all the washing and talking
and eating and waiting and dying explains
it like this: the ceaseless silver folding
of water on water, our lives like bright shutters of mist
over the stone seas of the hills.
An earlier version of this poem appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, No.42.
At the Bus Station, Kopanaki
The ticket man behind the counter
Finishes serving his usual customers and approaches.
Our transaction is brief but courteous.
Carefully he detaches the green and beige token of passage:
An hour to wait.
I sit outside, like the other travellers,
On the uniquely uncomfortable raffia chairs.
Mine is unstable and rocks me slightly.
It turns me into a blazing south-facing wall
That’s still unplastered. Breeze-blocks
Quickly and unlovingly slotted one to another –
The cement dripped in places
And has formed little unintentional ornamentations:
Here pearls, there a smudge suggesting a fishtail.
The windows are dark eyes open to the air.
A family gathers further down: Grandma
Brings from her store container after plastic container
Of sweetmeats and succulences: her son is going far.
The grandchildren stare up at their uncle,
A little frightened, for the first time sensing a threshold.
Pe–eetch! Pe–eetch! Pe–eetch! Threads in the sky
Steely as needles, fine as silkworms’ work;
Dozens, flashing upward to the lip of heaven
And then as wide as the two horizons –
Spooling and streaking
High, high, into the sun’s eye,
A swoop, skirr, skim
And wing-dive on their own wind
Down the reams of day to within a nail’s breadth of earth
To settle and chatter on a little ledge of summer.
Sweet swifts, fleet and fleeting,
– What seas, what seas –
Bring us the scent of forest in your feathers,
The four winds’ sleet and heat
In your tiny bodies, a planet’s turn
In the tilt of your wings.
By the unfinished house,
The men are playing heads and tails out of boredom,
A coin’s spin, a dream, and the travellers shift uneasily,
With their knees drawn up, watching,
Half-listening for the sound of the bus
And the worlds it will bear away.