Significant Other Read online

1.

  The shape of the dark

  when she opens her lips

  on the lilac’s frilly cock of pollens

  Each identity:

  an allusion to the other

  A furzy pubis

  on the Milk and Honey

  The reciprocal capture

  between bee and flower

  2.

  It wasn’t only the orchids

  masquerading as bees,

  the flowers making promises

  of phony nectaries,

  I also thought of the wasp –

  the way she’s known to hatch

  her important dreams

  on the caterpillar’s back.

  Of course I thought of the mantis,

  I thought of the cuckoo too –

  still nothing helped explain

  what I had done to you.

  3.

  A note on the petal

  from the last nectar-robber –

  I was here and drained the lot.

  Others near and read

  and reel sharply back

  into the sky.

  No matter, what he wrote

  wears off – one flower

  clothed in yellow claws

  needs one full turn of Earth,

  another dressed in blue

  just minutes to re-self.

  Eye & Sight

  When I was a stay-at-home eye,

  sight would often leave me

  like water lifting from a lake

  he mixed with other bodies.

  I guessed he loved, the way clouds love,

  the free and godly view

  and didn’t know the more he pledged

  himself to this pursuit

  the more he’d fall straight back to me.

  Like any eye, I sank

  all his disclosures through a nerve

  streaming towards the dark.

  Spiny Cockle

  From their metre-deep sandy resorts

  the waves have raised these hard orbs:

  clenched like cement hedgehogs

  they wear their ribs inside out

  and pricked with a white picket fence

  to keep their soapdish interiors –

  their lattice-gill-slither selves –

  from the crunch of an oystercatcher’s kiss

  or the orange fog of this starfish

  that causes one cockle to buckle and let

  its long pink foot slip like a leg

  from the slit of its crenulated skirt:

  soft pogo on which it floppy-leaps

  away across the wet desert.

  The Wingless Wasp

  It seems that ‘one’ is fated

  to be another’s ‘half’ –

  what sense in this construction –

  wingless cliché on a stem

  waiting for her man

  to lift her from her feet

  because the fruit’s too high to sip –

  rising between the branches

  I say ‘they’ and you say ‘it’.

  Worm

  And like so many times before,

  the worm catches the bird

  by quietly and cleanly

  pushing from the dirt.

  Standing en pointe, the worm

  attacks his yellow beak;

  jabs so hard the bird’s almost

  lifted from his feet.

  Professional, silk-suited, she

  requires just one stroke

  to twist herself around

  the silver hook inside his throat.

  The worm, both rein and rider,

  now being safely tied,

  gives a final twitch

  and hoists the bird into the sky.

  The New World

  It’s leaf-nose o’clock. The pink toes are poised.

  In the dark understory, the wolf with eight legs

  dines on the harlequin’s long eyes.

  A whip on the floor, a whip on the limb.

  The bush-master waits.

  An untouchable lobster

  fattens upon the leaf litter.

  Some body is calling for mother, mother.

  Some body munches on sphinx.

  For all their splashing in the figgeries

  the earless family can’t wake

  the kissy sounds from sleep.

  Rainforest Spelled Backwards is Lustful

  Amongst the saplings and small ferns, you

  can’t help but see a skirt of penises

  prodding into the earth, the roots are short and

  unobtrusive warts allow the tree to suck

  the air is steamy and I become self-

  conscious of this other body, I don’t know where to

  ‘look! the erotic palm tree!’ the guide announces

  quietly I question if he’s made the name

  up above the other trunks, the palm grows

  pregnant, or so indigenous peoples are said

  to believe in desire is surely to believe in

  hunger leads monkeys to the topmost fronds

  because the drupes are ripe one drops

  like an earring among the leaves I am very small

  Harvest

  for Frances

  After stripping the branches of berries

  the robin held a handful of seeds

  in her stomach: the robin carried a tree

  – in fact she secretly sowed a whole forest –

  a store of bows and arrows and shields.

  Years found the bird had planted a battle,

  her tiny body had borne the new king.

  Men looked up to the skies and blessed

  or blamed the planets moving overhead.

  A blackbird, meanwhile, started to pick

  at the fruit both armies had left.

  Tended

  A hot afternoon and tiredness has him

  turning to the garden for fresh air

  where he spills coffee and goes to swear – and swears

  because she is, of course, in bed

  and not about to come downstairs.

  Beyond the oak, in full sun the fields

  of maize grow rainbows as the tractors spray.

  Beneath her curtained window, in their plot,

  tended by his hands these days,

  a bee is abandoning itself on his abandoned spade.

  From the corner of his eye, he sees her

  raise her claw as if to wave.

  How long now? He blows away the steam and sips.

  The struggling buzz of the bedside bell.

  It no longer seems like myth: to live

  like bee to blossom, blossom fruit;

  within an hour of each other, leave.

  Nuptials

  One day, downhill from the farmer’s field,

  I, a frog, married a drain,

  married its cool and its damp,

  web-wed its steely gills,

  its shaggy walls and mind of flies:

  to which the drain gave consent

  silently adding its nuptials.

  So overgrown with green

  and happy clamminess,

  on the eve of our first year

  a fifth foot bulbed from my skin

  with something of the pressure and shape

  of a cork being eased

  from a bottle of champagne.

  Crickets

  With this breeze

  the springing crickets explore

  an astronaut’s grasp of gravity. Flung

  like the second half of a metaphor

  I look back and there I am

  and here, too

  differently. Uncrossable

  space between myselves.

  A crowd

  of moonwalkers tittering

  and not one cricket

  on the breeze.

  Strawberry & Ship-of-War

  They plucked each other out of the air

  the way you might pluck any two words

/>   and now they’ve as little between them

  as a strawberry and a ship-of-war –

  she asks me how to make this work,

  the last six months she’s been aware

  a strawberry is like a warship because

  neither are similar, they’ve really

  nothing to say to each other;

  easier to paint the small fruit

  with smaller uniforms, union jacks –

  what’s tying them together except

  their obliviousness concerning

  the instincts which govern them,

  their being aphrodisiacs.

  Barnacles

  Think of them now – Invincible, Endeavour

  well-endowed with this swamping thatch

  of teeth, this citadel of calciferic bedsits

  their single occupants can never leave –

  what is it about November that washes

  urge into this one’s sinus-heart

  eliciting his wily pipette

  that with its several accordion folds

  stretches beyond his stuck-fast self

  to become a proboscis, a blind man’s stick

  abristle with sniffing as it wavers and knocks

  against his lady-neighbour’s operculum doors

  only to break off like part of the rigging

  the moment the mood no longer takes him.

  False Limpet

  Armour tailored to an elbow’s point and wrinkle, and with that same toothy colour: a False Limpet by this encyclopedia – as if it were never itself, only the imitation of something else. It’s the way you hold your mouth so tight; you’re so like someone I once met – but O, watch this slip from the rock with a splashy unclinginess.

  Shadow Tale

  In the tree, down the trunk,

  on the curb and then running

  in front of a car.

  Experience has taught me

  if it doesn’t work out with you,

  if I don’t see you again

  along comes another

  I can’t tell apart.

  I’m Doing You an Injustice

  It’s like I’ve invited you to a party

  of people I know but you don’t –

  I see you fitting into the erratic

  spaces between people talking

  till I only see parts of you

  like the nude beneath the willow

  who doesn’t look quite herself

  dappled by the shadowings

  from what is given light first.

  Succession

  A gap in the trees

  where a fig takes hold

  and capuchin monkeys

  after the fruit;

  like bold picaflores

  who venture for nectar,

  leaf-cutter ants

  for their leaves;

  gold-miners flit

  between heliconias,

  workmen methodically

  take down the trees.

  Luminescent

  for Sharanya

  I believed I was like

  the rockpool’s tuft

  of ale-brown algae

  that exclusively blushed

  luminescent blue

  when poked by that

  boy with a stick

  who was really hoping

  to poke a starfish –

  only to find

  I can, all night,

  by any breath’s ripple,

  perform my own borealis.

  Crab

  Sublittoral place in which this crab sits

  like the lid of a pie, its crimped edge

  rests upon a mixture of pincers, legs –

  two black dactyls headline the others

  dressed in the fizz and stubble of brick.

  It’s these bone clothes the crab outgrows

  the way song, lifting a decibel, bursts

  a glass, there’s some civil upheaval

  as the crab thwarts the fortlet of itself

  and pauses for a minute, out-of-body,

  a faded, vulnerable replica,

  a soft ball of milk with milk’s film skin

  soon to search for a hiding place

  for the time it will take to scab over.

  Significant Other

  A cloud takes on the shape of a tortoise.

  The tortoise can never

  repay the gesture. Unashamedly,

  its owner once believed that it answered

  hello in its reptilian hiss

  as she once believed that he, who delighted

  her body, delighted her body

  only. Did the creature ever think

  a thought her way?

  The tortoise snaps its tortoisey jaws

  eating all that’s laid on

  without looking up.

  Examples Include Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’

  The toy ring with little kitten’s face

  loves the world so very much!

  Child’s room, roadside, ocean floor…

  decade after decade, it can’t tear itself away!

  When the world comes home tired,

  the toy ring with little kitten’s face

  is the pink and heart-shaped post-it note,

  is the bunch of petrol-station flowers

  one person gives another as they imitate

  the hard-wearing infatuation

  of the toy ring with little kitten’s face.

  Oh people in their cars and kitchens

  singing of forever and always…

  Really! You have to feel for them.

  Are We There Yet?

  So we may move beyond our park

  (with its yellowed trees,

  the taciturn ice cream vendor

  whose flavours now seem bland)

  a bridge is designed and built.

  Like someone approaching

  a stranger in a bar

  I’m no photographer, but I can picture

  me and you together,

  we stride across; the rails

  already bushy with brassy

  locks that love the bridge that links

  this part of earth with the next

  Notes

  The use of the phrase, ‘Significant Other’ is influenced by Donna Haraway’s discussion of ‘significant otherness’ in Notes of a Sportswriter’s Daughter and The Companion Species Manifesto.

  In ‘Choosing’, the number of eight million refers to the estimated 8.7 million species currently living on Earth.

  ‘Say Heart’ alters a line from ‘Lying’ by Richard Wilbur.

  The first line of ‘Spirit Human’ is taken from ‘The Bad Touch’ by The Bloodhound Gang.

  Both italicised sections of the first poem of ‘Nectaries’ come from Isabelle Stengers’s theory of ‘reciprocal capture’ in Cosmopolitics I.

  ‘Spirit Human’ and ‘Rainforest Spelled Backwards is Lustful’ are written after Matthea Harvey’s style of lineation in Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are due to the following publications in which these poems first appeared: Poetry, London Review of Books, Wild Court, PN Review, Stand, The Compass, Hotel, And Other Poems, ‘Triptych’ (Guillemot Press), Entanglements: New Ecopoetry and New Poetries VII. ‘Difficult Cup’ won The London Magazine Poetry Prize in 2015, ‘Limpet & Drill-Tongued Whelk’ won The Basil Bunting Prize in 2016 and several poems received The Girton Prize in the same year. ‘Together’, ‘Harvest’, and ‘I’m Doing You an Injustice’ appeared in the pamphlet, Dazzle Ship (Worple Press, 2014).

  I am immensely grateful to the Society of Authors for an Eric Gregory Award in 2017, to the Arts Council England for a grant in 2016 and to the Hawthornden Foundation for a Fellowship in 2012. My sincere thanks to the Charles Causley Trust, Cathy Rozel Farnworth (host of the Roger and Laura Farnworth Arts Residency in partnership with the Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival) and Crackington Manor for giving me spaces
in which to write the beginnings of this collection, and to Trelex, Tambopata Research Centre and Rainforest Expeditions for giving me the opportunity to be resident poet in the Amazon.

  Huge thanks and love to Phil Child, Jenna Clake, Emily Hasler, Sharanya Murali, Robert Peake, Declan Ryan, Ruth Stacey and Luke Thompson.

  About the Author

  ISABEL GALLEYMORE’s debut pamphlet, Dazzle Ship, was published by Worple Press in 2014. Her work has featured in magazines including Poetry, the London Review of Books and in New Poetries VII. In 2016 she was a poet-in-residence at the Tambopata Research Centre in the Amazon rainforest. In 2017 she received an Eric Gregory Award. She teaches at the University of Birmingham.

  Copyright

  Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

  Carcanet Press Ltd,

  Alliance House, 30 Cross Street,