Ian Davidson
BETWEEN THE BANKS
Structures of state
emerge, things to come,
balanced between the
banks. The tide rises
and falls and profit and
loss and their imminent
collapse or a skim of
language stuff I’ve
picked up dirty on
the river like the
black plastic bag
held up by words
like maybe body parts.
It’s a dirty business
when a civic centre
becomes a
development site
and so much debris.
The tide rises
inexorably time
after time and sweeps
all before it. When the
tide turns the flotsam and
jetsam in suspension
between upstream and down
as the duck family
keep tight to the margins
and the jetskis throw out
exhausted water and the
town hall is sold down
the river, the tide falling
away, between the banks.
MORDEN TOWER 2016
for Tom, Alex and Bill
Through gutters drains and
culverts water whispers to itself
its one intent to move its
memories of where it’s been,
the shapes it made in brief
alliance with the margins that
it passed the colours it may
take its composition as
it hits the sea oh water
you are everything and more
and you take all before you.
I immerse my
self as in the whisper of
a breath like Pickard reading
Bunting reading Briggflatts
in the Tower as if each
word would never follow or
the air become expelled with
out the shape a sound might make
in feeling formed from the
apparatus of a mouth propped
open so that air and water mixed
may freely pass
beyond the body Bunting.
FOR LEE HARWOOD
Walking and always where
the brush brushed my skin
or the instruction to stop
and listen the things
you told me and your
disappointment in
my local knowledge.
The way you stopped
and coughed the last time
we tried to walk, the feeling
about the route we’d planned.
We cut sideways
down a steep
bank where flowers grew
their names a mystery to me.
The slippage of a walk
with Lee between worlds
as the folds between the
voice of the father or the
wayward child are in the
single tongue of the orchid.
THE DAY TOM RAWORTH DIED
The Tyne runs deep, and this is what a
poem does, on the day Tom Raworth
died. And the things that return with
every tide, and those that go to sea.
And this is how a poem is, the police
boats inexpertly navigate the river’s
surface, past the tracks of sea
birds on mud, the shallow channels
where water flows from the city. And the
tide goes in and out and trains
pass on the bridges to timetables
and a grey sky threatening snow
and the poem is as the poem says,
an unexplained object breaking the
surface, the day Tom Raworth died.
Structures of state
emerge, things to come,
balanced between the
banks. The tide rises
and falls and profit and
loss and their imminent
collapse or a skim of
language stuff I’ve
picked up dirty on
the river like the
black plastic bag
held up by words
like maybe body parts.
It’s a dirty business
when a civic centre
becomes a
development site
and so much debris.
The tide rises
inexorably time
after time and sweeps
all before it. When the
tide turns the flotsam and
jetsam in suspension
between upstream and down
as the duck family
keep tight to the margins
and the jetskis throw out
exhausted water and the
town hall is sold down
the river, the tide falling
away, between the banks.
MORDEN TOWER 2016
for Tom, Alex and Bill
Through gutters drains and
culverts water whispers to itself
its one intent to move its
memories of where it’s been,
the shapes it made in brief
alliance with the margins that
it passed the colours it may
take its composition as
it hits the sea oh water
you are everything and more
and you take all before you.
I immerse my
self as in the whisper of
a breath like Pickard reading
Bunting reading Briggflatts
in the Tower as if each
word would never follow or
the air become expelled with
out the shape a sound might make
in feeling formed from the
apparatus of a mouth propped
open so that air and water mixed
may freely pass
beyond the body Bunting.
FOR LEE HARWOOD
Walking and always where
the brush brushed my skin
or the instruction to stop
and listen the things
you told me and your
disappointment in
my local knowledge.
The way you stopped
and coughed the last time
we tried to walk, the feeling
about the route we’d planned.
We cut sideways
down a steep
bank where flowers grew
their names a mystery to me.
The slippage of a walk
with Lee between worlds
as the folds between the
voice of the father or the
wayward child are in the
single tongue of the orchid.
THE DAY TOM RAWORTH DIED
The Tyne runs deep, and this is what a
poem does, on the day Tom Raworth
died. And the things that return with
every tide, and those that go to sea.
And this is how a poem is, the police
boats inexpertly navigate the river’s
surface, past the tracks of sea
birds on mud, the shallow channels
where water flows from the city. And the
tide goes in and out and trains
pass on the bridges to timetables
and a grey sky threatening snow
and the poem is as the poem says,
an unexplained object breaking the
surface, the day Tom Raworth died.
Copyright © Ian Davidson 2019
Ian Davidson’s most recent poetry publications are The Tyne and Wear Poems (Red Squirrel Press 2014), In Agitation (KFS 2014), On the Way to Work (Shearsman 2017) and Gateshead and Back (Crater 2018). These four pamphlets are an extended response to moving from Wales to live in Tyne and Wear from 2011 to 2017 and their concerns inform these four poems in Molly Bloom. Recent critical work includes a number of essays that explore ideas of mobility in the work of Diane di Prima, Bill Griffiths and George and Mary Oppen amongst others. A sequence of poems written during an extended stay at St James’ hospital in Dublin is forthcoming from New Dublin Press. Ian is Professor of English and Creative Writing at UCD in Dublin. His work appeared in Molly Bloom 7.
