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Cardigan Poems

(Some loose threads)

By C S HughesPublished 3 years ago Updated 3 years ago 3 min read
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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

sad poetry
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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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