Cardigan Poems
(Some loose threads)
An Endless Thread, Unraveling
She asked me
Will you remember to
Remember me to you
But I suppose if you don’t recall
I must have forgot
Mr Barouche has four wheels
With spokes thick as knitting needles
Making heavy cardigans of narrow roads
You stir the fishbowl of my mind
Filth and gravel rising
In that Charybdis swirl
Of somewhat trammelled hurricanes, the small man
In his aqualung, unsurprisingly dismayed
At his capsized arrondissement
From the crenellations of its walls
Nevertheless, still blowing bubbles
Here is a thing, you say, quite golden
Surprisingly negotiating a new air
But, for that, out of breath
As if you were the petiole
And rising from you palmate hand
An offer small and beggared
Unseasonably Falling
The sun is blind
The old man said
Steps as elusive as wet clay
Milk blue opals in his eyes
Arm outstretched for leverage
In a mantis feeble invocation
The sky a fleck of spit
The road across the cliffs
A muddy chalk
Suitable for marking games
Of war and hopscotch
Casting stones
One knee bent
The trench foundation deep
In a kind of homage
That winter
We did not eat ice-creams
Thought how you wore
A cardigan like rope
Though really it was unseasonably mild
As late spring dancing
One and two and three and four
The pebble skipping
As if this were
A calm still lake
And not another
Stuttered evening’s fall
Still, a hand that reaches out
Measures time
Quite differently to the straightened mouth
Of discomfited laughter
Mr Eliot’s Cardigan
Not necessarily the washing up (per se)
Or our partial conversations
Misheard over the Niagara roar
The machine makes in its circumambulations
Mother is the cruellest month
As Mr Eliot said
Or some such rigamarole
Denuding the beasts of empire
In appropriate cloth
A pillage of a kind
From the moon worn surface
Of life’s threadbare cardigan
Overstretched
The cobblestones quite black
Arm across my eyes to shelter
From the enfilading light
The streets more oblate than illuminati
Dragonesque as the portmanteau
That I left by accident
In the terrace house
With the ugly doll’s facade
The face cut away
In a vivisector’s brute proscenium
Uncouth wallpaper and the rime
Of mold in tongue thick sheets
Buildings are always hungriest at the end
(I think, at the lion’s foot
of the iron bed’s burnt skeleton
the springs still tortuously singing
in the evening’s blunt, machining air)
Before the insect demolition
Reduced the reticulations of our interrupted days
To an over polished engraving
The mirror blur a shine
Lost the dregs of history
A dead bird in your hat
&
With that chagrined, glassy eye
Temeritous and warning
Say the word until
All meaning has demurred
To a length beyond
This last reticent speech
When the world has gone
(It doesn’t matter which)
To a guttural sibilation
Shout it out and swallow
Neither profundity nor pronouncement
Just in memory’s shadow
A superfluity of meaning
La Tricoteuse
Propriety is a vole, I thought you said
In your fists, red wool tangling
I imagined, coutured and sleek, coiffed
Ferret creatures, well turned out
Carefully replacing cobblestones
In the jigsawed street
All Sunday blasphemies put aside
With impromptu ideologies
For spring cardigans and Phrygian bonnets
The arrayed corpses, in the bolt hole of your heart
Of mice and men and other victims
Of your incensed perspicaciousness
Hung upsides down to slowly mummify
While you dress in the glory
Of their tangling eviscerates
Tight-lipped smile a sinister shade
Small sharp teeth, snick-snickering
While you hum a pompous Marseillaise
Dourly knitting, knitting
Slipshod Path
Cardigan catches
Stray spidered threads
Unraveling the pondered wait
For a capricious emergence
A quiescent shape within
Blind as Magdalene
Shaken at the eclipse
On her upturned face
Remembering the travailing sun
The path has slowly
Curled its lip
A proud, disdaining sneer
To trip
At the shoulders
The seams divide
Droop at elbows
The way bound wings
Restrain a sacrifice
The piecemeal shape
Through spider glass
Behind lace curtains
Once house proud
Twisting yellow embroidery
The sink has yesterday’s cluttered accusations
Stained with the remnants
Of lost evening
Chrysanthemums & Cardigans
When the wind howls down the day
I will wear a cardigan big as love
With its tatters and loose threads
That you unravel in rapscallion curiosity
Hiding from the howling trees
We watch how wept chrysanthemums
Fall to the rippled pond
Reflections no more idle
Adrift amongst uncertain doves
When the rain wolfs famined ground
A darkness in its ire spreads
You will shrug inside my sleeves
A cardigan so warm and big
The world will disappear
About the Creator
C S Hughes
C S Hughes grew up on the edges of sea glass cities and dust red towns. He has been published online and on paper. His work tends to the lurid, and sometimes to the ludicrous, but seeks beauty in all its ecstasy and artifice.
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