Want
She told me she hadn’t really wanted to make love with me all those years ago. She’d just been too weary to say no. But didn’t you like it when I kissed you on the throat? I asked, and bent down to kiss her there again. She didn’t move away, nor did she respond, just like the first time, I now remembered.
Complicit
She showed me a satirical portrait she’d sketched of me, in which I looked like a denizen of a house of ill-repute. She challenged me to replicate the drawing, but to paint myself in a different light, and to include her in the picture. The problem was I was no good at drawing, and only likely to make a bad situation worse. Useless to tell her I hadn’t done anything wrong apart from live my life a little too distractedly at a time when what I did would alter her life too.
Reading
I was surprised by the reflection in the hand-mirror she gave me before I went on stage. My eyebrows looked as if they’d been plucked to death. There were only a few strands of hair on my skull. I was old, almost ready to die, yet still so vain.
Care
The woman in the wheelchair demanded I wheel her around the neat gardens of the posh hotel. Under her orders, I went faster and faster until I made myself so dizzy I collapsed, pulling the wheelchair down with me, so that she tumbled into my arms, the warmth and softness of her against me as we lay on the wet grass, with the world spinning.
Last Trip
My mother had a metal brace attached to one leg. She tried, but couldn’t get up the steps of the seaside train with the open roof, and I had to lift her. She was so light it was as if she were already spirit.
Survival
I wasn’t sure I’d remember the path. I was walking with my daughter through a forest in search of the ruins of a cottage where I used to hide when I ran away from home. If only I’d known on those cold nights that years later I’d return with my own flesh and blood to discover that the old blanket I slept in was still there.
Ian Seed’s
collections of poems include New York
Hotel (2018), Identity Papers
(2016) and Makers of Empty Dreams
(2014), all from Shearsman. His book The
Thief of Talant (2016) (the first translation into English of Pierre
Reverdy’s Le Voleur de Talan) is
published by Wakefield. New York Hotel
is selected by Mark Ford as a 2018 TLS
Book of the Year.
She told me she hadn’t really wanted to make love with me all those years ago. She’d just been too weary to say no. But didn’t you like it when I kissed you on the throat? I asked, and bent down to kiss her there again. She didn’t move away, nor did she respond, just like the first time, I now remembered.
Complicit
She showed me a satirical portrait she’d sketched of me, in which I looked like a denizen of a house of ill-repute. She challenged me to replicate the drawing, but to paint myself in a different light, and to include her in the picture. The problem was I was no good at drawing, and only likely to make a bad situation worse. Useless to tell her I hadn’t done anything wrong apart from live my life a little too distractedly at a time when what I did would alter her life too.
Reading
I was surprised by the reflection in the hand-mirror she gave me before I went on stage. My eyebrows looked as if they’d been plucked to death. There were only a few strands of hair on my skull. I was old, almost ready to die, yet still so vain.
Care
The woman in the wheelchair demanded I wheel her around the neat gardens of the posh hotel. Under her orders, I went faster and faster until I made myself so dizzy I collapsed, pulling the wheelchair down with me, so that she tumbled into my arms, the warmth and softness of her against me as we lay on the wet grass, with the world spinning.
Last Trip
My mother had a metal brace attached to one leg. She tried, but couldn’t get up the steps of the seaside train with the open roof, and I had to lift her. She was so light it was as if she were already spirit.
Survival
I wasn’t sure I’d remember the path. I was walking with my daughter through a forest in search of the ruins of a cottage where I used to hide when I ran away from home. If only I’d known on those cold nights that years later I’d return with my own flesh and blood to discover that the old blanket I slept in was still there.
