Two Poems by Ian Clarke

Ian Clarke was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire in 1954. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies including: Writers of East Anglia, ed. Angus Wilson; Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry, Ed Vernon Scannell; and In The Telling, ed.Susan Richardson & Gail Ashton. Ian has also been published in several magazines including Acumen, Envoi and online with Ink, Sweat and Tears. Recent publications include A Slow Stirring (Indigo Dreams, 2012) and Owl Lit published by Dempsey and Windle (2017)

School

Yellow caped, fingers numbed,

traipsing to carbolic air again,

to the tang of blood and rust,

a barren desk scarred,

goal-posts fog-deep in mud.

And there I am-

a swiss-roll of trunks and a towel under my arm,

past heaped mats, a bugle, a javelin,

a foetus pickled in a jar.

Then walking the small-talk home

as lightning splits the sky to summer,

to a tan-smooth thigh, a freckled shoulder

mapping the breeze,

until a chill mist closes in

and I hunker down again:

Plantagenet, Tudor,

how cobwebs were gathered

to staunch and scab,

and how his brother, he said,

came home from the trenches

a dunce, tone-deaf,

his growl throttle-thick

where he lay flush to the earth

like a hare snug in its form.

And how he left us to books and lines

to inspect the pitch,

his old eyes drifting beyond sunlight

to the outskirts of rain.

And where he lies now there’s shrapnel and bone

under a stone’s silence,

his name lichened, nettled,

lost where years pile and darken,

leaving me to this day in late August

and an early dusk scenting shadow,

with ice crouching in the breeze,

the dark still remembering my name.

Mudlark

From his lean-to,

the blood gold of autumn darkens.

Then the wind wild with rain

and behind the Mermaid’s warm smog breath,

the Thames squabbling,

where he’s steam-bending oak,

caulking the seams

of bawley, cutter and skiff,

searching the Holehaven

with cockle-rake and glaive,

mud-larking for coins, glass,

a rhino tooth lost from Doggerland.

And where the Thames unravels,

loses its name to creek and turbine,

he’s there fog-deep in mud,

watching London drift out of sight

like pinpricks on the marsh.

And there he is

with his stash of driftwood, mirror and glass,

and his sculpture split lean and spurless

ready for the sea-bank,

ready for the years to turn in its shadow,

dawn and dusk blood-lit in its eye.