Prize-winning poet, Roger Elkin was literary advisor to the Leek Arts Festival, for whom he organized an International Poetry Competition (1982-1992); the co-Editor (1985-1988) of Prospice, the international literary quarterly, issues 17-25 inclusive; and sole Editor (1991-2006), of Envoi, poetry magazine, issues 101-145 inclusive.

He has reviewed for Stand, Outposts, Envoi; and his critical articles on Ted Hughes’s Recklings poems have appeared on the earth-moon website and in collections of essays edited by Keith Sagar, The Challenge of Ted Hughes, and Joanny Moulin, Lire Ted Hughes.
 
He is poetry tutor on residential weekend courses at Wedgwood College, Barlaston: for full details see www.sgfl.org.uk/wmc

Fixing Things

Roger Elkin

ISBN 978-1-907401-27-5

86 pages

£7.99

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Bedding Plants

Alyssums (Dad’s white-flocked
little offspring; the spawning
yes-men of his dirty fingering;
surging midsummer infantries,
seductive like seed-eyed flies)
usurped the laundered beds,
mouthed the virginal lawns,
spread purpose in their doily heads.

Humping selves to sudden
insurrection, their insolent plumes
summoned gazes, praise and aahs. Blooms

sunned his awkward walk with pollens,
plashed out themselves to pocked
existence as their bulging columns
routed out the hummocked
mosses’ cushionings, and made their floods

his lifebloods

Fixing Things

Dad stood aloof, black-booted as usual, scattering lime,
broadcasting kill kill kill in white silent arcs,
overseeing trench preparation, spraying sulphates:
stormtrooper of the woodlouse’s Auschwitz.

And up above, turning its back,
the faceless glass angled blandly away
fixed in its surface innocence.

Scrambling, hogbacked, fourlegged into corners;
snouting out confederacies of mildew; up-turning
pale cabalas of fungus that stretched white-mouthed toward light;
thin-skinning lichenous scabs quietly knitting brick;
peeling back fat moss with its tangerine mantles, sleeping
greenness, conspiracy of silence –
all that was bestial.

But couldn’t compromise:
an empty pan proffered for inspection
would be evidence of their fixed existence.

(Something about tensile roots, rubbery tongues
nudging against hands, proclaimed
their fixation for this place.
They would be back, again.)

But could usher others out of reach:
those sliding things, agile spiders, coal-needle beetles,
millipedes threading themselves to zany safety.
their mobility helped dissembling.

So while I outgrew innocence and friends
they became the fixed companions of my youth:
their crime, like mine, a smallness
against his ordered design of things.

Stumping Times

Most days before I saw his rolling shape
I heard that rumbling-thump – step-stump –
of clumping boot drumming on raddled path
that nosed through hushing musks of growth

was when I hid behind the shed
until my beat of pulse, my pumping blood
twinned with his iambic tread:
da-dum da-da da-dum da-Dad

then suddenly he bull-trundled into sight -
like drunkard struggling with his bowling gait
to gain his pace - boot hovering – nearly there –
finding place, negotiating space in air

and there he loomed, goat-footed,
gianting above me where he traded fears
against my sympathy. Some darker booted
god, he revelled in my spilling tears

while my must of being slid to guilt
wringing in my hands, and ringing in my head –
You kid Yes Dad Who me You lad –
and knew I’d later be made to pay

for feigning innocence he’d re-named insolence
as beat of strap on bedside sheet
rang out that iambic natural beat
Take that thwet-thwack thwet-stump thwet-thwack

was then I wished you dead, my Dad

Puttying

was hateful. Islanded out there, stranded on that sea of glass.
Walking planks, lodged on struts, spidering the rigging.
Heave to, lean-to. Shuffling under sun, fly-writhing
in reticulated web; worm-squirming in deep heat. No escape.
Only clouds a relief; but always heat. Striking rays
from on top; scorched glass from beneath. Attacked all ways.

More pervasive Dad’s incisive eyes. He never budged.
Almost rooted. Anchored boot below made him immune
from climbing; fractured leg gave him authority.
Not to consent would let him down. Be insult.
Soft putty moulded in his hands, he worked on guilt, or charity.
(At times like this you envied him his pain.)

Your putty always reluctant. Cream stuff, sweaty in the heat.
Wouldn’t heal: too malleable. Dragging knife down, cutting the
edge,
dragged it snagging with it. Had to be redone. A burden.
Impressing mathematics, he called it a right regular prism.
Prison you smirked, safe out of reach, up there. But pressed on,
knew it must be done. If not now, then another time.

Something queasy in hearing glass easing
beneath your weight. Such slenderness separating
from plant hands stretching up inside. A safety net?
You knew they’d never help. In breaking fall
would break themselves. Soon dawned they pushed away.
Their heads leered at fear. Everything hostile.

Even linseed smell invaded clothes;
and the bits of it, down chipped nails, clung.
Revenge came afterwards, as far from glass
and on its own accord, thumb pushed residues
to crippled images, stunted forms:
that hateful putty in your hands, your bones.

Watering

At nearly dusk, pushing wide the door, you entered
sweltering musk to water. Held onto breath.
The day’s warm air moved, searching-out, pleased for release;
the drifts of ripening, a headiness, plants leaning with drunkenness.
You could feel the success they shared between them
at having exhausted heat, used up all the light
to fatten them. But gasped for air.

They lifted when you came.

And watering was rainbowings of soft sprays that swam down glass,
drop-dripped, made tiny rivulets on handed leaves, turned soil
to darker shades, and fed the moss that lipped the paving stones.

And watering was filling sunken paths between the beds
to bright canals that come midday would magic away,
but for the time were satisfied with seeps of wet,
the humus sweating, roots resettling into place;
and all the plants sighing, taking breath,
whispering silent praise.

Spiders

Dad didn’t like them either: unpredictable,
wriggly things, frizzy in their busy-ness,
with seeking feelers and bended legs;
their quicksilverness in turning into ball
or escaping in swathed veils of web;
and abseiling down on air in starts and stops,
their snapped trails snagging in his hair.

Their suddenness from box or pot
ambushed his gangling walk; threw
shadows where he dared to square his boot.
That dash of black or brown panicked him:
he feared to tread – squelch, squish – in case
he slipped: their death somehow anticipating his.

So trapped them under clarity of glass:
that way managed their activity. Fitted lids, screwed
fast, and watched them skirting the curve
and scrambling crab-like in some tragic dance.
His eye bent level with the held-up jar,
he fed their fear. Must have seemed like Gulliver.

They stayed alive for days on dusts of nothings,
till dried to skin, paper-thin; pale veins;
stick limbs dangling, angular, akimbo
as if caught mid-stride to freedom.

So it became with him those last three months
of bed-baths: his trailing web of being; limbs
hanging hopeless/helpless; staying alive for weeks
on nothing; trapped by the clarity of where he’d
slipped, panicked by the suddenness of his
sliding path to death; his freedom-fear.