Poetry: Éireann Lorsung

An England

Éireann Lorsung

 
[audio:https://newfound.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Lorsung-AnEngland.mp3|titles=”An England” at Newfound |artists=Éireann Lorsung]  
That we should sit
here in the sun at a wide
window, with tea
 

That this morning we drove through hills
the green of the hills the bright
green of them
 

– –
 

Something about asphalt, something
about white concrete slightly glittering, a
weak sun even now in April. How can
we know when the thing is finished? We
start pulling bindweed off, we pull ivy
off, the corner of the eye locates a brief
patch of snowdrops, by now so rare after
three months in bloom.
 

– –
 

Above in the rowan
a blackbird rasping
zinging & knocking
like I know not what—
like blackbird
 

– –
 

In quiet I want to record the pinnate leaf
just the movement of a needle through cloth
by hand over and over through two layers
of cotton cloth

We talk about growing things
a pot of uncared-for geranium
 

– –
 

The noises of other birds and
guitar music
as you sew and I look
at things on the internet
 

– –
 

In the window of the dormitory one man
sits and we always wave to one another

when I walk up the hill
a complaint
in my inarticulate calves
 

– –
 

Maple trees beginning to loosen
now the color of nothing
but themselves,

chartreuse brighter than Chartreuse
tipped where they emerge with brown
& red
 

– –
 

The man with the blue
turban walks by

Meaning: it is 8:30 a.m.
 

– –
 

All together at the bus
stop the smell of fresh
air dampening the
wooden bench

its three worn slats
 

– –
 

What is the word for this
sound, rain against glass
in long spatters?
 

– –
 

Today along the road a patch
of clover with extremely large
leaves

green uniforms of ambulance
drivers

the cart for returned books
in the library also green, dark
green like their clothes

the way dense vegetation is
green from a distance
a green you cannot see
through
 

– –
 

Craving water
coleus plants
turn white, their green

edges turn pale

We of this time
are not the same
Outside the rain
begins again
 

– –
 

Water in the gutter
and along it snow
or petals
 

– –
 

Today new patterns
of white, black, green

bright green almost
yellow and white
we cannot determine

Snow hangs in the sky
where air keeps it
we

are kept here on earth
by who knows, perhaps
that green
 

– –
 

A close feeling behind glass
Above us the clouds almost breaking
Assertion of the possible verb ‘to go’
 

– –
 

For a moment in the first person let me
tell you how fresh it smells and how cold
 

– –
 

Muscaria, false cherry, crabapple, ornamental
pear, grey willow, sea buckthorn;

bird cherry, sweet chestnut, narcissus with a fat
red rill around a yellow face, hornbeam,

wych elm, hazel, alder, wild plum;
laburnum, broom. Aforementioned maple.

Exuberant rose. Through all this, air
yellow, verging on green.
 

– –
 

By waterways the smell of wet begins.
By daffodils.

By narrow boats, by Sainsbury’s,
by cottages (Grade 2 Listed), still standing
near the lock.

In living-rooms the smell of damp comes up.
In terraced flats.
In between walls, in corridors,
in caravans, the rise of damp goes
on all night.
 

 
Éireann Lorsung is the author of “Music For Landing Planes By” and “Her Book” (forthcoming 2013), both from Milkweed. Other work appears or is forthcoming in Burnside Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Collagist, and Bluestem. She edits 111O and co-runs MIEL, a micropress.

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