3 poems by Polly Walshe

Service Station

People trade in car parks all the time –

possessions they’re not sure about,

parents, parasols, warped garden forks.

Children negotiate redoubts of hate

without reward. Strangers try to relate.

You saw it happening by the chargers.

Don’t sulk or take selfies, you’re seal grey.

Below your eyes the greige concealer

cracked after it dried. Strange that you need

this place, wagtails trotting like bored vicars,

dubious evergreens, drugged landscaping.

Watching old men expand out of their cars

can make you smug among the aucubas.

But there’s moraine inside these minutes,

loose bone under the parking boxes;

freak thoughts rotate, the sort you prayed

you wouldn’t entertain again, ever again.

Psalm

after Paul Celan

In the field were nothing, no one,

and I was nothing, no one in the field.

Free was the field, neither smooth nor rough,

and free was I from the pressings of

self in that field, which is the only field.

The oaks were not lost enough to live there,

the jealous grass kept its distance.

A nothing-rose grew in the field,

exploding into nothing from nothing,

a great bald holiday, a vast escape,

and the field in consort yawned, a yawn

like a thorn, wild thorn, without colour

or shape. How loose, how logical it seemed,

being nothing, being no one in the field.

Lake of Me

There’s the lake of me

and the ragged little bird of self.

Poor bird dips in, dips out.

Poor bird must work

and cast an anxious face about,

but the lake,

faceless resort,

has no requirement to talk to anyone.

Drain her, she’ll turn into sky.

She may expand again with rain

or she may fall in with the sea,

it doesn’t matter really.

Since she dresses in reflection

it’s easy to look through her,

declare she isn’t there,

but poor bird always finds her

and roosts among the reed beds,

comforted.

___________

Polly Walshe is a poet and novelist from London. Her poetry has been published in a wide variety of journals including: PN Review, The Spectator, The London Magazine, Shearsman, 14 Magazine and many others. Last year her pamphlet Silver Fold was published by New Walk.