Five Poems by Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts has been writing ‘seriously’ for over 40 years. He has won prizes and had poems published in magazines and anthologies. His latest collection is The Shell-Gatherer:
Anthony Watts
*
The Visitant
1
He came not from a star but from some nowhere
Between the stars or beyond them
The planet hurt
Its beauty hurt like migraine
He came as to a banquet of skeletons
The skulls crawling with flesh that wreathed and writhed
Into smiles he could not touch
And the eyes
The eyes in the skulls were stars
Their signals flashing past like meteors. He bounced
Off a wall of body language. He wanted to die
Banished from the feast he looked around for scraps
He went for the Big Bits
Life Love Hope Eternity… A dictionary
Snatched them from under his nose like a dog
He hovered in orange twilight
The street lamps shivered in the water and the countryside
Was shut for the night. He felt the earth shudder
With the spasms of its numberless creatures coupling
With screaming brains. He howled at the moon
2
He looked one way
And there was Outer Space
With its glittering opportunities for self-advancement
And another
And there was Inner Space equally starry
Offering self-effacement
The grand annihilation of the ego
Now where were the launching pads?
Unfortunately
There was nothing more to be seen
He took a job as a clown and brought the house down
To rebuild it they said would take an estimated
Eternity so he entered the building trade
Men came with shining eyes and plans
For the New Jerusalem. He set to work
The site was on quicksand
He invested in concrete brass tacks
Bedrock
There came this faint anonymous pressure at his fingertips
A butterfly settled briefly on his retina
Then everything melted like lard at the bottom of his brainpan
3
He tried The Truth – mmmmm a ripe smooth grape in his mouth
All that rich vibrant juice limbering to jump
Clear and bespatter everything
But the skin was pliant steel he bit
And all his teeth fell out
He tried Self-knowledge that elegant full-length mirror in the mind’s wardrobe
But all he saw was his reflection motionless expectant
They stared each other out a thousand years
He tried Sex the famous five-star recommendation
But between the anticipation
And the recollection
There was no room for him to breathe
He tried Nature but she looked the other way
And with a most strange and distant smile
Hummed the tune that he could never have learned
In a month of somedays
He tried losing himself in the crowd but the crowd
Mingling with his faceless corpuscles lost
Itself in him
He tried Small Acts of Kindness, it was embarrassing
He met Politeness wondering what he was after
He tried Doing Nothing but there was nothing not to do
He tried Any Old Thing but every old thing
Just slapped his face and marched out slamming the door
He tried Not Trying
That wasn’t right either
4
Choked on earth
Drowned
Cremated
And gone into thin air
His ashes came to rest on a hilltop
A kiss of sky healed him
Remade under a cloudless dream of nowhere
He felt the planet’s gravity retreat
Like the end of a long impaling
At last I know he told the sky
That you alone are real
The sky smiled
Said nothing
Knowing of a sudden what he had to do
He turned
And entered the waiting womb
Who came not from a star but from some nowhere
Between the stars or beyond them
Turning from the light as from the dark
Crawled maggot-like into man’s colourless interior
Until at last
Quite lost he found
Deeper than thought
Deeper than love
His final place of unrest
*
Dawnscape
Rinsing my soul: the sky’s big sink;
shifts of cloud like rusty brillo pads
scouring the enameled east.
Return of sun:
blushing truant royalty breaks out of somebody’s loft,
blazing rim slicing through ridge tiles, noonward thrusts until,
clear of the roof,
in consummate levitation,
collars the realm.
O underlit
explorable sky.
My poor rockpooling hunger
grazes its knees across vapid crags,
plunges
elbow-deep in puddles of light.
A needle draws a tinsel thread,
sewing cloud to cloud;
the stitches come apart in frazzled puffs.
A tiny jet plane, glittering at needlepoint
(How many fallen angels jostle there?)
burns like a fuse across the gulf of air.
Super silent,
ultra
slow,
spearhead of technology redeemed
by distance
and a real, an ancient dawn.
