Through the Looking-Glass

In this empty street
a young woman –
knees and thighs
braced, her whole
body given over
to muscular effort –
is coming toward me,
gripping in her strong
hands the mahogany
frame of a cheval glass,
its mirror missing,
her face centred
in the vacant oval.

She claims space on the wide
pavement, as if, carrying
her improvised wooden O,
she’s making a piece of theatre
for her private enjoyment.

Or, as I approach her,
is she about to tell a story
that will involve me, take me
to a place I can’t yet imagine,
leave me changed?

After the Incident

Man puts finger to lip
hears the hot pulse
in his ear. Must sit
must settle.

Head sore, bone sore
he wrings out his cloth
over the scummed sink,
hangs it on a nail.

Raw skin lets blood, blood
runs thin in water. His joints
flame, he’s loud with rage.
And still the stain.

Reaches for the leather
pouch, draws a thin paper,
fills, tongues the edge
just enough, and rolls.

Look!

(After Frank O’Hara, and reading James Wright’s ‘A Winter Daybreak above Vence’)

Look! Here’s a poet talking about Vence,
so immediately I forget about
his goats and his roses and I think I’m in Venice.
The poet’s grouchy dog is mooching
along the side of a canal, of which there are also
a good many in Venice, California. And on top of that
it occurs to me that it too has any number of bridges and gondolas.

The wide-angle porches of its pale bungalows
are strung with magical apparatuses:
wind chimes, temple bells, dreamcatchers.
The sun comes heavy through the spangled smog
and a row of wavy palms diminishing into the distance
makes me think of the blond British boy with the round eyeglasses
and what he’s painting. How he’s making his SPLASH!

This is where the Big Red Cars used to run. Pacific! Electric!

And look how this in-line skater
in his Greek-letter sweatshirt and black lycra
is drawing figures along the entire length of the boardwalk.
He moves like hot oil, shining, leaning
into his stride with a flick of his slick calves,
weightless, as if he’ll just go and keep on going
in a smooth unhurried line all the way north
to San Francisco.

You glide, baby! You glide!

Vineyards, Narbonne

Dazzled by geometry, we drive
across a cat’s cradle, a grid seen
through a mesh, tricks played
on the eye that leave a retinal mark.

Slowing, we see how each vine’s
pruned to the bare stock, the shoots
creeping along taut wires, new leaves
sketched in green brushstrokes.

Here are the black buds, notes set
on a lined stave, an ancient script
whose inky characters ascend
and descend, unscrolling as we pass.

This is the alphabet of old
cultivators, their learned parsing
of soils sentence by sentence,
the earthy manuscript of terroir.

At the Great North Museum, Newcastle

‘The bride was offered gifts to take to her home.’

Here’s the quern, her old companion, passed down
by her foremothers, wrapped in coarse cloth and straw
and sent here by sea in case the right stone can’t be found.
A platter on which she lays bread, brushes crumbs
from its grooved rim, throws them out for sparrows,
the way she did at home in Ostia.

Jugs, their lips not yet chipped from packing
and unpacking, years of scouring. Ordinary things
her children will know by first touch, as they know her.
A jar of perfume, presented by her husband.
She doesn’t open it, can’t feel its usefulness
in this windy, unaccustomed borderland.

A cameo on a gold chain, made here in Britannia,
drawn over her bright hair, laid against shy skin.
The rosy stone’s been ground away, leaving
the white figure of a bear, its muzzle raised
as if to sniff the chilly northern air. Who
in great Rome will believe in such a thing?

Imogen Forster lives and works in Edinburgh. She has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University (2017). Her pamphlet The Grass Boat was published in 2021 by Mariscat Press, Edinburgh. It was reviewed by David Morley in Poetry Review, Autumn ’22, and the title poem appears in Best Scottish Poems 2021, the Scottish Poetry Library’s online anthology. Her second pamphlet, with the provisional title Adverse Camber, has been twice shortlisted and is seeking its place in print.