Karen Press Poems

There's a sledge hammer going steadily
in the upper left corner of the roof.

A roar of steam from the cappuccino jet.

A rotary machine drying itself
or the air or something else helpless and silent.

Someone knocking espresso bricks out of their mould
against the side of a bin, metal on metal.

Dean Martin crooning his love
to a thousand violins.

The garbage van compacting the street's refuse
in four dimensions of decibels.

Teaspoons clattering onto saucers

A fly coughing and coughing on my arm.

Across the road the sea in its own silent movie
throwing up waves, catching them in its blue arms.
...

If I could just
catch the man falling
there, so high, so tiny

if I could just
push my hand through the screen
into the burning city

I'd be bleeding, he'd be screaming,
the terror would be real
inside, here

there's smoke and ash pushing against the glass
trying to reach me -

Or if I come outside,
lie down in the wet grass until my skin shivers,
smell the green night rubbing my cheeks

if in the sky over Refrontolo
a satellite can find me, take my picture,
show it to the people in New York

who'll lean towards their screens fascinated, aching
through this distance -

*

In Frankfurt I stand one arm's length
from a woman on display
and in my chest a burning grows
that I mistake for sadness and then recognise as shame.

No-one should come this close
even to the bronze and oil paint simulacrum of a moment
of such detailed inwardness. Every fold and freckle of her sagging face
stands still for me to catalogue. This pain cracking my heart open

is the artist's trick. He's pushed me through the screen.
The woman's eyes refuse mine, her lips stay closed.
The words that name me come out of my own mouth:
Housebreaker. Violator. Thief.

*

Don't stare, it's rude.
And empathy is rape.
And kindness is, like hunger, loss of self.

What is the right distance for touching?

They say if you want a dog to come to you
stand still, don't run towards it, calling.

And when it comes?
...

Geological time locates us
at the crossroads of hominids and democracy,
wiser or younger or older or more harmonized
than the non-miraculous nations of the world.

We used to be teeth like grubby stones
packed solid in warm earth.
Our teeth were enough to tell
the fossilised story of our lives.

Something unearthed us,
broke us open, flung us out
into the big black nowhere of the universe.

Something rearranged the coal dust of our souls
so that we could have the momentary radiance of flowers,
and become rubies more precious than blood.
...

Water sloshes over into the new hollows
finding its level again
and the weight of it lies a little differently
over the earth.
Stolen air is swallowed now in different corridors,
the map of suffocation redraws itself.

The dogs track theft's footprints steadfastly
through offices and parliaments.
These cupboards splintered by laws,
these gardens carried away as evidence.
Bring the food trucks and the milk trucks
to this side now.

Mass death has moved in here,
the groaning old woman in the child's house,
and the child at the door looking out
with her wide clean eyes like empty bowls,
and the dogs moving past,
noses to the perfumed road.
...

Soft on a summer bed in the Languedoc
a man in an Afghan prison sits with me
watching his brother walking through snowdrifts
to a village much like this one
(boucherie, tabac, boulangerie, broken shutters)
where a month's supply of bullets lies secured
in a box beneath his mother's wedding carpet.

Turning the pages of Bruce Chatwin's life
I feel the ashy bodies shift and stutter downward
through steel sticks broken on New York's southern streets.
Peruvian feathers hang in coloured blocks
across the whiteness of a wall in England,
the man in the snow takes another step forward,
under a sky-blue burqa a woman writes to the man in prison
without pen or paper.

Together we turn the pages, always together now.
Lavender. Ash. Snow on a black beard.

Marseillette - Kabul - New York, September 2001
...

How did you know?
I find them now

as I need them:the Neruda volume,

the Zen anthology,
the Horowitz recordings.

You laid a trail quietly
and left, left your warm gown,

left the incense wrapped in thin paper,
the matches in your pocket, still dry.

I remember the saxophone you sold
before I was born.

When I hear it now
I know I'm walking in the right direction.

I look up and see you on the horizon,
walking along it, looking for something.
...