Watering Can E-Book

Caroline Bird

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 67

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Caroline Bird's two earlier collections were acclaimed for their exuberant energy, surreal imagination and passion - 'a bit of a Howl for a new generation', wrote the Hudson Review. Watering Can celebrates life as an early twenty-something. The poems, writes Caroline Bird, 'contain prophetic videos, a moon colonised by bullies, weeping scholars, laughing ducks, silent weddings - all the fertiliser that pours on top of your head.' The extraordinary verve and compassion of her verse propels us into the anxiety of new responsibilities. Raw but never hopeless, Watering Can has comedy, wordplay and bright self-deprecation.

Leseprobe

CAROLINE BIRD

Watering Can

for my Dad

Acknowledgements

With thanks to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: Poetry London, Bat City Review, City State: New London Poetry, Oxford Poetry 2008 and 2009.

The poem ‘Women in Progress’ was commissioned by BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

The Videos

Last Tuesday

Peaked

Wild Flowers

The Golden Kids

Impartial Information

Expecting Rain

The Monogamy Optician

The Oven Glove Tree

Bow Your Head and Cry

Head Girl

Road Signs

Bright Winter Mornings in Oxford Town

Stage Kiss

Seesaw

Penelope’s Chair

D.N. eh?

Hard Times

Weather Vain

Grudge

Sun Settlers

The Fall of London

House and Soul

Our Infidelity

The Doom

Perspectives

Poetry as a Competitive Sport

Wedding Guest

From the Sewer to the Sea: ‘A Healing Progress’

Detox

Poet in the Class

Blame the Poodle

Short Story

Lunacy

The Perfect Man

Reminder Notice

Mr Bird

Flat Mate

The University Poetry Society

I Married Green-Eyes

Familiar Ground

Women in Progress

Sky News

Closet Affair

Inner-city Plot

The Alcoholic Marching Song

Company of Women

XI Tyrant

A Love Song

Also by Caroline Bird from Carcanet Press

About the Author

Copyright

The Videos

Someone gave me a video of your entire life.

There’s a twist at the end

when you discover that you and your mother

are actually the same person

and I drop out of the picture in about two months’ time,

only to return as a busboy

who steals your handbag and uses your passport

to smuggle loads of rabid dogs into the city.

I’m one of those strange comic characters with a dead tooth.

You get married to an organisation junkie

who sells your hair to buy a stash of pocket calculators

and your daughter falls in love with me

and I break her heart over a plate of tagliatelle,

then you get addicted to cough mixture

and sleep in a sodden nightie with the windows open

before buying a lovely house in the country.

Last Tuesday

I miss my Tuesday so much. I had a Tuesday

today, but it wasn’t the same. It tasted funny.

There were signs it had already been opened.

The seal was broken. Someone had poisoned it

with Wednesday-juice. In fact, I think today

was actually Wednesday, but the government

was trying to pass it off as Tuesday by putting

my tennis lesson back a day, rearranging the

tea towels. I sent a letter to MI5 and the CIA

and the rest. I know they have my Tuesday.

They’re keeping it for experiments because it

was so freakishly happy. I was smiling in my

sleep when two men in body-sized black socks

stole it from my bedside table. It was here.

It was right here. But when I woke up, it was

gone. Their Wednesday stole my Tuesday.

Their frigging totalitarian cloud-humped shit-

swallower of a Wednesday stole my innocent

Tuesday. And now it’s just getting ridiculous:

the days change every week, it’s like an avalanche.

As soon as I start to get the hang of a day, learn

the corridors, find my locker key, the bell goes

and suddenly it’s Thursday, or Friday, but not

last Friday or Thursday, oh no, these are different

ones with kneecaps like pustules, gangly eyes:

you never know which way they’ll lunge.

In the Lost Property Office, I held up the queue.

‘It’s greenish,’ I told the attendant, ‘with a mouth

that opens to a courtyard.’ But they only had a box

of wild Fridays some lads had misplaced in Thailand.

(I took a couple of those, for the pain.) Then I

gave up. I ignored the days, and they ignored me.

I drank Red Bull in the ruins of monasteries,

flicking through calendars of digitally enhanced dead

people: Gene Kelly downloading a remix

of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ on his slimline Apple Mac.

No one gives a damn about time anymore. Happy hour

lasts all afternoon. You can put a hat on a corpse

and send it to work. You can bury a baby.

Hip counsellors in retro tweed jackets keep

telling me to look ahead. There’ll be other Tuesdays

to enjoy, they say, new Tuesday pastures. It’s a lie.

I found my Tuesday in someone else’s bed.

Its chops were caked in velvet gel and its voice

had corrupted. It pretended to be a Saturday,

but I could see myself reflected in its eyes, a younger

me, tooting the breeze with a plastic trombone.

‘I’m sorry,’ said my Tuesday, pulling its hand out

of a woman, ‘I didn’t mean to let you down, but

I couldn’t stay perfect forever, you were suffocating me.

Even sacred memories need to get their rocks off.’

Peaked

Popped out,

showered off,

took my burden

down to the play school,

bought a Lego mansion

they never finished building,

paid through the neck for twenty grams

of glitter glue, hit the chocolate milk,

learnt Danish with the purpose of reading

The Ugly Duckling in the original,

didn’t see it through, washed-up, my fifth birthday bombed,

‘I preferred your early work,’ said a girl with measles,

‘it was rawer, richer, these cupcakes seem hackneyed’,

superiors tried to placate me with kazoos,

plasticine crumbled to luminous ash,

my novelette about the hippo

was mistook for a comedy,

Miranda, that cunning bitch,

read her poem in class,

‘My doll’, it was called,

pretentious crap:

immature,

clunky.

Wild Flowers

I will be sober on my wedding day,

my eggs uncracked inside my creel,

my tongue sleeping in her tray.

I will lift my breast to pay

babies with their liquid meal,

I will be sober on my wedding day.

With my hands, I’ll part the hay,

nest inside the golden reel,

my tongue sleeping in her tray.

I’ll dance with cows and cloying grey,

spin my grassy roulette wheel,

I will be sober on my wedding day.

I’ll crash to muddy knees and pray,

twist the sheets in tortured zeal,

my tongue sleeping in her tray.

Church bells shudder on the bay,

fingered winds impel the deal:

I will be sober on my wedding day,

my tongue sleeping in her tray.

The Golden Kids

She became an usher to an usher in an ushering firm

for failed burglars with tiny torches

waving fools up the runway in theatrical darkness.

He had a baby by accident,

a blank colour house like a primary school foyer, hiding

from his baby, knees up in the Wendy house,

reading and rereading the alcohol proverb.

He joined a charity organisation.

Oh, the willow tree shelter of other people’s problems,

whining up around you like sticks of faded light.

She found happiness in love, of all places,

happiness in love. Oh mourn the happy.

He waited for his mum to die

then started playing drums in a band

called ‘mad for the mad’, wearing eyeshadow.

She fell for a millionaire

and locked herself in a house with cocaine

and playing cards and rang me occasionally

for stories of the city.

She became an astronomer without a telescope,

writing ‘Today will be a lucky day, but unlucky

things might happen’, bought a bong and settled down.

She walked in on a friend having sexual intercourse

with a dog and nothing was said except

‘That’s not your dog.’

She left the mental asylum to work in mental health care.

He left the rack to join the army.

She left the heroin to write a book.

She drank a small espresso in a café in Paris

forever, surrounded by gorillas with hamburger breath

and notes on failure to perform in bed.

He sat on the floor and waited for the surrealists

to convert his empty flat into an Indian elephant.

She bought a surfboard decorated with a painting

of the sunrise, propped it up like an ironing board

against the French windows and demanded it

make her carefree.

He became the thought of his wife in a bar with a man.

He became the thought of a man on a beach

at six in the morning with a broken metal detector.

He became the thought of a man on pills without pills