November:
hunched above the peel-specked sink
he
skims his fingers with the steady knife.
So
many hours and still no time to think
and,
in the bitter winter dark, his life
curls
smaller, colder while the city blooms
with
fire, expands itself beyond the night.
No
call for bloated dreams in narrow rooms,
no
cause, these frozen days, for stunted flight.
There’d
been vague promises he meant to keep
or
leaps of stubborn faith he’d planned on taking;
there’d
been a hazy summer half-asleep,
he’d
faked whole lives and hoped to go on faking.
Now,
if he dreams, it’s only surface-deep
and
always at the needle-point of waking.
‘Casi como un
milagro’
Every morning begins with a cup of
coffee,
and over time the rings have moved like
ripples
across the faded surface of the kitchen
table.
Each small mark is a sign of victory.
Every morning, he takes a book of poems
and reads
for half an hour at his desk, stealing a
few lines
for a notebook which has frayed with
time.
The seven o’clock cold curls around his
feet.
For years, mornings have begun this way
but now he feels a desperate need for
order,
a rage to cling to details, to record the
swell of birds against the paling sky.
Each day becomes a requiem for all he
cannot know;
still, in its minor way, a miracle, like
bluebells in the
snow.
Midlife
morning
The
middle comes nowhere near the middle –
one
morning spent dragging a hangover
to
a pinched spit of rock, I’d recover
a
single word from the deep brown ribbon
of
a rip current and then hurry on,
feeling
the quick thrill of being alone,
noticing
only that the sea seemed new:
a
midsummer, kingfisher shade of blue.
Bionote
Jacob
Silkstone lives in Bergen and has previously worked as a
primary school teacher
in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is a poetry editor for The
Missing Slate and an assistant editor for Asymptote,
and his work recently appeared in Sculpted: Poetry of
the North West.
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