Five Poems by Irene Cunningham

 

 

LAND of LAKES

Kitaj’s art

 

A perfect view of a perfect part

of an imperfect world would heal

any who spent time there…

not living in it just gazing down

at distance, calm waters –

the opponent of humanity,

all deceased salted beneath.

 

Turmoil burbles up from under.

 

Aliens peering at us would be drawn

to the blue of our presence,

bright possibilities of such a party,

such a garden… the sweep

and curves of rivers

sloping hills, overlooked

by the moon in all its appearances.

 

EVERYTHING DREAMS

 

1

Magic is tricky. I’m waiting for some

thing to switch on or off, edge me into

giantism, stretch me thin to tower,

stride… get anywhere soon. These bones are weighed

down. I’m a five-foot pear-shape who would be

ten with laughing bones, rapt at long, smooth, proud

limbs out on the landscape. Take us running,

gangsters demand. Femur, Tibia and

Fibula, bold weight-lifters, rise to take

control, show the 206 in full bloom.

Distal phalanges, dancing like old-time

pianola keys, want to be longer

to play more than Chopsticks, be a session

musician, play fabulous blue-grass jazz. 

 

2

I wish to speak with Taliesin, pick

at his dreams. Multiple voices fill up

my brain. The ancient world remembers how

roots wait in dark earth for magic’s return.

Fibula sings aria in the bath

has fantastic aspirations to be

front-stage famous. The distals wave themselves

sick at over-sensitive wallowing.

Just do it, they say as if they can run

off anywhere like a mouth, or stretched legs

in a relay race; they’re excitable

in a fantasy setting… aren’t we all

in a democracy? Placement is fact

until the chorus opens a movement.

 

TURMOIL 

 

Crow has huge speakers to boom after dark…

kick out the gulls, capture everything.

 

Drunk woman thumps, bangs, dances… howls

into her inner space. Crow blinks, seeks a hood,

 

opens the door to evict but drunk woman sings

her present tense, afraid of landing in her empty nest.

 

Her neuroses are monsters, beasts, but without them

she’d drift off in the first waft of wind, elsewhere.

 

Sometimes her mind isn’t hers. Someone was clothed

in her body. She dresses in wigs, hats and sunglasses

 

to buy milk, bread. Some weeks she lives on toast,

cold semolina, thinks about lobotomies, of resting

 

in a peaceful garden but they belong to asylums stuffed

with madness. She wishes she knew who was who

 

and who to kill, considers offering herself to science

to become a robot, face the world with cool attention.

 

PLANS 

 

It’s not for me to show you this never-ending road…

it was yours from your first breath.

 

You might think it an un-ending straight line but

diversions arrive, a few at a time.

 

Some you discard for lack of skill, finance; they return

as second or third chances.

 

In this country winding lanes with high hedges lead to

villages and limited options

 

which will add a ring of confidence to your smile. Who

would I be if not for this, that, and you?

 

Who will you be from picking left over right, today

instead of tomorrow or next year?

 

Fortune-tellers can salt your mind with possibles, dreams

but each version of you will happen.

 

 

Irene Cunningham has been anthologised, magazined & collected: SANDMEN: A Space Odyssey, Hedgehog Press. No Country for Old Woman, Dreich. Talking to Walls, Up@Ground Level, Amazon. She’s a Glaswegian living in Brighton. 3 decades ago she had poems in London Review of Books (as Maggie York), Stand, Writing Women, New Welsh Review, New Writing Scotland, Iron, Hybrid, others. The Lake, Laldy!, Shoreline of Infinity, Strix, Power Cut, Riggwelter, Southbank, Broken Spine Live Arts anthology, Acumen, The Journal, Crank, Double Speak. She is building collections to clear space, safe herself from drowning in poetry pulp. Refinement is probably more useful when describing whisky.