Like the Roman
So because you thundered to me, in third person,
from fire mountain 火山
that you mean little of what you say,
although you do believe in every action which you
set in motion,
each gesture, every posture finely weighed
on golden scales, with an engineer’s precision
and freedom
like the dreaming eremite who hears God’s song in the hills,
I must bring myself to remember that
you overflow
with an intentionality most of us cannot grasp,
primitive tongue lagging thick behind you, unable
to keep pace with
your superhuman acts, those of some Ashoka,
a light which withdraws from lumpen humanity,
shutting forever
the screens of dawn, marshalling vitalities,
marching in Nietzsche’s dreams, debellator, hypergiant glowing
volatile, plunderer,
mesmerising troubled girls with its peril and purpose
(at least if I’m willing to buy what you’re selling)
pure force,
not just a cause of fights and broken plates
while I expend my heartbeats on this heating planet
of outmoded fears,
waiting, like the last of the dinosaurs, for calamity.
**
Provincial Life
To take sixteen remembered years
of plastic chairs of morning blue,
summers that wheeled past like bicycles
through the air,
beyond the window,
someplace else,
of chewing yellow Staedtler pencils,
Hovis sandwiches with a single slice of ham
and apples swapped for Wagon Wheels,
of steel files striking into sparks,
holiday pavilions on crisp packet beaches,
biking up Beamhill Road,
of creaky bunk beds,
of what wasn’t said,
of stillness—
and distil them,
if not into real lines, then at least into
the shape of lines
on the shape of a page
the vanilla-flower scent of verse,
to take my true yet unpoetic past
of Iceland dinners in a cladded house,
of shadows darkening the night and
the gas fire burning blue through the icy air,
yes, to raise it up somehow
to sit, uneasy, in an incandescent waiting room
thumbing a copy of Gardeners’ World
alongside Ozymandias and Achilles,
who serenely contemplate their crosswords,
giant, untouchable.
**
James McGovern [1] studied English (BA) and Creative Writing (Master’s) at the University of Oxford. His work has appeared in Litro, Prospect, the Oxford Review of Books and others. In 2019 he was selected as one of The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019–20 (Eyewear Publishing) and longlisted for the Calibre Essay Prize. He is Advisory Editor for Creative Writing Studies at Vernon Press.