COL E SWENSEN

Five Poems

They Were Warned

Often they were warned by lighta nun in Essex, c. 700, who said who said my hands a face in perfect peace behind it have turned to suns and know

lamps the size of rooms a torch erase lighter than the sky

and another who saw

that the body grows

that also opens

into a plate of day.

All these were ways of saying death as I so often do, slipping but of what Im about to say

is something that comes to you as I might come to you an arm around you thinking not of the gesture

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Gravesend

My ended grove

my threaded shriek

drawn along

by swans straining at the same. and which?

Did you fall off the edge as if a little ever this ready

home carved from an egg

trap door slowly spread through every room the dead are hauling

a circus behind them in flames

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There Was Nothing

There was nothing in the grave. They cracked it open and only the newspaper. The grave came back. He stirred his tea with a finger and glanced at the news. There are no graves in Gravesend, which is of course logical. And overflowed with it The relation of water to the dead in which we washed our hands in its liminal spacesbridges, rivers, shore upon shore and shoreline unfurling the shadow around a person was a shroud unwound and the tiny thing flying.

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Kent

In the grounds of Bayham Abbey a procession of monks just about dusk go walking.

in a garden designed by Repton or just after darkness has fallen

Or there was no sadness, but a simple fold in time. One must be for others a reason to live. Often, it is said, the presence of a ghost is signaled by illogical cold. Lord Halifax noted it when investigating the Laughing Man of Wrotham, who strode into his brothers room and murdered him again and again

to the horror of the maid who, a century later, wedged a chair against the door and watched him disappear. There is no cure for anything, and that cough you have, Madam, once there was a fire every Friday the 13th, and once there was a death that seemed to deserve it, but that was an illusion. Once there was a death, but that was illusory, too. And all over Kent, someone is still heading up the stairs, lighting the way with a match.

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Miss Jromette and the Clergyman

Wilkie Collins had a brother had loved only once love will come back encountered in a garden edge on her speech pulled him in will know

accompanied the gesture at the throat for him, it was a simple story a garden, the summer of night and on we go

by a tall column of mist as she, the mirror of his a woman the foreign

to her murder, then a woman ago

how wrong she has been

and still walk to the station

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