Philip Gross

It's not exile, homes and families behind
us, where we meet. It happens anywhere,
now: a stateless
state of no name, quietly seceding
...

The count of cappuccino,
the marquise of meringue,
all the little cantuccini...
...

sings and hums and talks and whispers to itself.
It never sleeps.
It groans, it shudders to the rhythm of the waves.
...

just clangorous muting. Then, by degrees:
‘an expressive
aphasia,' say the doctor's notes. Too true.
...

Home, after too long
in hospital, your each
step hesitant
...

Sunup in the financial quarter, sheer
mirrorglass empires lit each by each other's light
...

Flat earth: how
could they have thought it?
Where did they imagine that the sail
...

It's not exile, homes and families behind
us, where we meet. It happens anywhere,
now: a stateless
state of no name, quietly seceding
from the crumbling empires round us,

without stamps or Eurovision entries.
No-one does it with a rough guide in a week.
You inhabit it
or nothing. Like this: in a pavement cafe
you blink and you seem to surprise them,

the crowd, all its separate faces at once,
coming out of solution like crystals,
like a rush of starlings
or the breeze that lifts the canvas awning
now and dents your cappuccino froth

with a crisp little sound. And that's it:
between breaths, just between you and me
as if; yes,
QED. You are received. This is
the freedom of the city, and the key

to the kingdom, and its borders ripple
outwards like a frill of breaking wave
onto flat sand,
a wavering line already fading leaving
spume-flecks high and dry,

a prickling on your palm; you're five
years old, looking up at the whole sea,
unsure:
will you laugh or cry?
...

The count of cappuccino,
the marquise of meringue,
all the little cantuccini...
and what was the song they sang?

Oh, the best of us is nothing
but a sweetening of the air,
a tryst between the teeth and tongue:
we meet and no one's there

though the café's always crowded
as society arrives
and light glints to and fro between
the eyes and rings and knives.

We'll slip away together,
perfect ghosts of appetite,
the balancing of ash on fire
and whim—the mating flight

of amaretti papers,
my petite montgolfiere,
our lit cage rising weightless
up the lift shaft of the air.

So the count of cappuccino,
the marquise of not much more,
consumed each other's hunger.
Then the crash. And then the war.
...

Jigging the text, the torn tracts, till they slot
and settle, the inscribers of the coming age
lean back from the table. One folds a page
down, crisply. There'll be i's to dot
etcetera after lunch. Black pips of shot
in purple pigeon breasts (bred in the cage
for shotgun wars the house-guests wage)
are spat discreetly out, bones picked, and what
shudders of moon cross the lawn, what steel
zinging of bats as they stuka the lake . . . ?
The spoils of peace: the drafts and maps discarded,
numbers estimated who will wake to feel
the margins closing, run, sleep rough, take
their chance, ford rivers; the bridges are guarded.
...

I was the son of the Duke of Nowhere.
Nowhere was home. The first sound I remember

was engines sawing steam, the butt
and squeal of wagons full of clunk

shunted cruelly. Lifted to the window sill
I had my first sight of our exile

as I thought: Here, me,
watching . . . There, trains going away . . .

*

He was living incognito
but his secret was safe with me.

I was the solitary heir to everything
he never once mentioned. I guessed

from his brooding, his whole silent days,
it must be vast. The lost estates

grew vaster in the weeks,
then months, he went away and stayed.

*
Beyond the roofs, beyond the dockyard wall
were cranes, then the edge of the world.

On a clear day I could watch grey frigates
climb it and slip over. I woke one night

to singing in the streets that suddenly
grew small as all the hooters of the fleet

brawled up together, blurting
Home . . . as if any such place

existed, over the horizon, anywhere.
...

(for John Karl Gross)
The Severn was brown and the Severn was blue -
not this-then-that, not either-or,
no mixture. Two things can be true.
The hills were clouds and the mist was a shore.

The Severn was water, the water was mud
whose eddies stood and did not fill,
the kind of water that's thicker than blood.
The river was flowing, the flowing was still,

the tide-rip the sound of dry fluttering wings
with waves that did not break or fall.
We were two of the world's small particular things.
We were old, we were young, we were no age at all,

for a moment not doing, nor coming undone -
words gained, words lost, till who's to say
which was the father, which was the son,
a week, or fifty years, away.

But the water said earth and the water said sky.
We were everyone we'd ever been or would be,
every angle of light that says You, that says I,
and the sea was the river, the river the sea
...

for JKG
Ninety now, you're adrift on the vowel-stream,
the crisp edge of all your five languages gone

and we're back to the least of language. It's all one,
your, his or my slight modulations of the bare

vowel of animal need . . . though even there
how they give us away, our vowel sounds:

class, place, family secrets, the wrong
school or side of the blanket or overstayed

visa, let slip, between one consonant
and the next.
Erect

a fence of plosives, dentals and fricatives
as we will . . . in times of war and weather

we can't stem the vowel-flood; it will swell,
barely articulate. No border can contain it;

it will seep, erode, find
cracks; it will break through.
...

sings and hums and talks and whispers to itself.
It never sleeps.
It groans, it shudders to the rhythm of the waves.
Its timbers creak
in the language of every port it has put into -
the backchat, the patois,
the babble, the Babel, the smuggled rich lingo
of each dockside bar.
But hush: don't tell the captain or the bosun
or the loosely rhyming crew:
there's really nothing to it, poetry,
just air, hot air and paper, oh, and skill
and love and hope, between them
and the deep dark silent sea.
...

One flash and no looking back, that
moment, soundless,
through the plate-glass frontage
...