2 poems by Philip Gross

Guttural

They’ll be waiting for us down there, where the swirl

of silt surrounds us as we sink, at all languages' end –

half-dumb, galumphing; it's the slowest carnival,

like Breughel’s peasants, mud-shod. Don’t pretend

you never glimpsed them. They were always at the edge

of seeing or the street, where rampant curlicues

of brambles edged back in, all too happy to lodge

on fly-tipped mattresses. Offers we can’t refuse,

they come vowelling stubs of words as if they knew

what things escape our right and waking mind –

washed up at first light on a wave-swept mile

of shingle, without papers, responding to

our questions with one sentence we can find

no sense in - still less, the way that they smile.

Not Quite Totality

August 11th, 1999

Now, what are the chances of that –

a perfect fit,

the moon's shutter-lid

snapped on the sun,

at their different distances? Or that we

should be, you and I,

between lodgings and lives,

here and together, or

at all? Not quite totality,

as near as can be and you still be you

and I me,

changed. Really, now,

what are the chances of this –

the sky turned inside out, to neither

day nor night

nor twilight,

but as if the gaze

was shone from somewhere else,

sun, moon and earth all sidelined

as between

the tumbled racks of cloud

a deep up-chasm opens

into which we might fall

like the future,

our gravity gone...?

And of all places, here:

trucks in the supermarket loading bay

at standstill,

drivers, shop guys staring,

no pretence this is a fag-break,

and the shoppers straggling to a stop as if

unplugged? The sigh of the town into silence

like a single wave

back-dragging aslant

along a shingle shore

like a long slow tear down the seam

of a tired century

I’d never banked on leaving.

As if the real wonder

of the parting of the Red Sea

wasn't a tale of Israelites and Pharaoh

but the fishes gawping

from their high-rise

water-windows

thinking Now what are the chances of that?

for Z

____________

Philip Gross’ The Shores of Vaikus, written from his refugee father’s birthplace, Estonia,

appeared from Bloodaxe, November 2024. The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, 2022) was

shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, which he won in 2009 with The Water Table. He lives in

Penarth, South Wales. Read more on http://www.philipgross.co.uk/