Sarah Howe Poems

I watched the turquoise pastel
melt between your fingerpads;
how later you flayed

the waxen surface back
to the sunflower patch
of a forethought, your

instrument an upturned
brush, flaked to the grain -
the fusty sugar paper buckled.

You upended everything,
always careless of things:
finest sables splayed

under their own weight,
weeks forgotten - to emerge
gunged, from the silted

floor of a chemical jamjar.
I tidied, like a verger
or prefect, purging

with the stream from the oil-
fingered tap. Stop,
you said, printing

my elbow with a rusty index,
pointing past an ancient
meal's craquelured dish

to the oyster-crust
at the edge of an unscraped palette -
chewy rainbow, blistered jewels.
...

I keep everything until the moment it's needed.
I am the glint in your bank manager's eye.
I never eat cake in case of global meltdown.
I am my own consolation.

I have a troubled relationship with material things:
I drop my coppers smugly in the river.
(I do everything with an unbearable smugness.)
I propose a vote of thanks.

I make small errors in your favour. Sometimes
I pretend nothing is wrong.
I won second prize in a beauty contest.
I am yellowing at the edges.

I was last seen drawing the short straw.
I hang about tragically on street corners, where
I hand out cards that read: if you see
I am struggling to lift this card, please, do not help me.
...

Across the road, the girls quit school in threes
and fours, tripping off at speed to stations

or familiar cars, their silhouettes, slung
with shoulder bags and hockey sticks, like mules.

Remember, says the afternoon; the shut
door shudders brassily beneath my hand.

It is already dark, or darkening -
that sky above the dimming terraced rows

goes far beyond a child's imagining.
I tread along the backstreet where the cabs

cut through behind the luminous science labs -
their sills of spider plants in yoghurt pots

among the outsize glassware cylinders
like pygmies contemplating monoliths.

You cannot walk the other side because
the walled garden meets the road direct

in pools of spangled tarmac after rain;
the open gutter choking up with leaves.

As though to listen, the colossal trees
lean out into the tungsten-haloed street.

I meet another on the road - this snail's
slow ribbon turns the asphalt into gold.
...

This morning's autocorrect function flipped
my fat-fingered vision into visor.
I have taken to eating and sleeping

in a different room from myself. Sometimes
I could do with a helmet. She gave him
a glass clock as an expression of love

but really it was a present for her.
You could hear the affection frittering
away. Prepositions are for orphans.

It could be said all we need to survive
is the wet beading on its pillowy
surfaces, the salt-rose. Her fortitude

in briny air a lesson to those prone
to opening doors and leaving them that way.
All those visible cogs going about their

intestinal churn, a Copernican
universe - as insular. Adverbs are
for undinists. Over there seems somehow

further off these days. The dawn is a leash
round a prisoner's neck. Who is holding
the end? More wars than Kodak reels. Recall

how its glossy slink would spool and spool and
fail to catch? Still we don't recognize words
are the last things we should put in our mouths.

Nouns are for bourgeois materialists.
First place salt on the tongue. Then use the thread
to stitch up the lips. What to do with the

cherries? Its too-loud tick kept us awake.
I had to move it to the next-door room.
Then the next. Then lag it at night like a

talkative bird. The heart is a zeppelin,
tethered and leaking. How can we help but
scoff? People with glass clocks shouldn't row boats.
...

The last of the sheet I shuffle off an ankle -
a sound like the spilling of sand
from shovel and the night air blurs

for a second with its footfall.
Our entwined shape a word in the dark.
On my forehead and cheek

each flourishing
charge of your breathing
is a moment's reprieve. Heat


in this place goes deeper than sleep,
wraps everything, increases sheen -
the forearm weighing your flank

as, dreaming, you turn from me,
curlicues slick on the backs
of thighs, my hand at your neck

and eyes aware of several kinds of dark
struggling to perfect themselves
- the hidden chair, the bouquet of our clothes

the razory arms of a juniper rattling crazily
at the edge of that endless reddening haze -
glad we move on to the city at dawn.
...

Against platinum birches

I want nothing here [but you].



We have trees at home. Shall I

wing you the courtyard fountain's



midnight palaver, to lull

the list of your lonely sleep?



Love is wicker, then water;

marriage an avenue of



limes, but not the bitter kind.

I'm stood at the north extreme:



the reflecting pool unrolls

a shadow world of clouds &



yews, another far orchard,

enamelled pavilions.



It's shaking hardly at all.

My nights are aloner too.
...

Take
that pet of medieval didacts, the manicule, or little hand: fringe-dweller of
early manuscripts, whose jotted, peripheral fists, sprung with an admonitory digit
lace the tanned margins of our most cankered and flame-buckled books - a fervid
injunction to look. Picture them: speckled palely
at the page edge, their flare of crumbs trailing in
to the tangled inky forest of a spreadeagled folio
you've just heaved off the shelves. Now follow
their frail pointers as if you yourself - stooped
to track this scribe's oddly curling ascenders -
might be thrown back to the moment of their
still-wet penning & the cloister's draughty
aisle - you leaning in at the old monk's
shoulder & attending to that crooked
gesture: grasp his hand across the
ages' gutter - its urgent here
...

Belonging to the Emperor

Today my name is Sorrow.
So sang the emperor's first nightingale.

The emperor was a fickle god.
He preferred to be thrilled by an automatic bird

in filigreed gold. A musicbox, a leitmotif.
Love me, please. Orange blossom.

I see my father bathed in the blare of that same
aria, prodding the remote

to loop. Chiamerà, chiamerà -
His face is red. Beneath his glasses, it is wet.

Fabulous

GFP is a protein derived from the jellyfish, Aequorea victoria, which emits
green light upon illumination with blue light.
- Hofker & van Deursen, Transgenic Mouse: Methods and Protocols

Chimera, chimera -

where does your garden grow?
A grafted Paradise. A mouthful of snow.

A Trojan conception - maculate cargo.
A spliced mouse - its unearthly day-glo.
...

pickerel, n.1 - A young pike; Several smaller kinds of N. American pike.
pickerel, n.2 - A small wading bird, esp. the dunlin, Calidris alpina.


I see it clearly, as though I'd known it myself,
the quick look of Jane in the poem by Roethke -
that delicate elegy, for a student of his thrown
from a horse. My favourite line was always her
sidelong pickerel smile. It flashes across her face
and my mind's current, that smile, as bright and fast
and shy as the silvery juvenile fish - glimpsed,
it vanishes, quick into murk and swaying weeds -
a kink of green and bubbles all that's left behind.

I was sure of this - the dead girl's vividness -
her smile unseated, as by a stumbling stride -
till one rainy Cambridge evening, my umbrella
bucking, I headed toward Magdalene to meet an
old friend. We ducked under The Pickerel's
painted sign, its coiled fish tilting; over a drink
our talk fell to Roethke, his pickerel smile, and
I had one of those blurrings - glitch, then focus -
like at a put-off optician's trip, when you realise

how long you've been seeing things wrongly.
I'd never noticed: in every stanza after the first,
Jane is a bird: wren or sparrow, skittery pigeon.
The wrong kind of pickerel! In my head, her
smile abruptly evolved: now the stretched beak
of a wading bird - a stint or purre - swung
into profile. I saw anew the diffident stilts
of the girl, her casting head, her gangly almost
grace, puttering away across a tarnished mirror

of estuary mud. In Homer, the Sirens are winged
creatures: the Muses clipped them for their failure.
By the Renaissance, their feathers have switched
for a mermaid's scaly tail. In the emblem by Alciato
(printed Padua, 1618) the woodcut pictures a pair
of chicken-footed maids, promising mantric truths
to a Ulysses slack at his mast. But the subscriptio
denounces women, contra naturam, plied with hind-
parts of fish: for lust brings with it many monsters.

Or take how Horace begins the Ars Poetica,
ticking off poets who dare too much: mating savage
with tame, or snakes with birds, can only create such
horrors, he says, as a comely waist that winds up
in a black and hideous fish. The pickerel-girl swims
through my mind's eye's flummery like a game
of perspectives, a corrugated picture: fish one way
fowl the other. Could it be that Roethke meant
the word's strange doubleness? Neither father

nor lover. A tutor watches a girl click-to the door
of his study with reverent care, one winter evening -
and understands Horace on reining in fantasy.
...

Blockades and green carpeted cobbles - wide
city under sedation, streets pre-lunch but
post-défilé; the wind tugged at a niggling thread.
The sun by then a withered pear, we crossed
the square of the Bastille, stamped confetti
snowglobing in our gait. It was empty then,
and strangely benign, drooped geranium pots
tied to railings. Pooches gave no special heed.
Enough string cancels the need for memory
if you loop the knots from toe to neck to wrist.
By nightfall, the magazine stands oozed buff
nudes and neon wattage. COMMENT SAVOIR
SI ON S'EST TROMPÉ? Such glossed pulp.
Across the Tuilleries' parched and shadowed grass,
Chinese whispers was our game and cheating
compulsory. ‘Send rain and fourpence.' ‘Would you care
to dance?' With untold ingenuity we wasted the moon,
waiting for one true accident. Fidelity was a waltz
on the bandstand - home, we learned, to a phantom
tenor who counselled lovers in filthy acts. Nearby
a lately painted playground was overrun with ghosts -
the children who never woke. His Götterdämmerung
had brought down the rafters every night. We slunk
away like clocked-off scene painters, our palms stained
a municipal red, primary blue in the crooks of our knees.
The older boys scampered in shining culottes,
skimmed their hoops down sanded avenues. I stretched
my hand for one - eluding flesh, its spectral O
rattled on to infinity. ‘Souvenez-vous!' they cried, and laughed.
We had to go quickly, to hide the brightness in our eyes.
Their chanting was somehow delightful, but hard
to read as a book in an unfamiliar tongue. One girl
tied a knot on her balcony: her white hand a manicule tipped
from a gilded margin, her only revolution a staid carousel.
In a high-up rosette at the East of Sainte-Chapelle,
Christopher has been meditating, meditating on light
and colour, the opened flood and the weight of lead.
‘Don't stop,' urged the fireworks, getting brighter.
He wondered and was, in reflection, near overcome.
...