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JAMES SUTHERLAND-SMITH POET, TRANSLATOR, CRITIC Welcome to my website. This is my latest collection published in February 2018.
Art and Nature
The trees are as yet showing only minute points of colour, pink buds, yellow catkins, no leaf. So the ice hockey stadium isn’t hidden by the trees. Its walls were painted long ago in a green thought in a green shade unknown anywhere in nature, likewise the stripe separating the walkway from the cycle track by the river, itself an olive green, after the meltwater has gone. A truck tyre is visible and a supermarket trolley pitched there by the three musketeers. The black cat glides by on roller blades. A biplane trails a banner in the sky, “Do what comes unnaturally.”
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This is a new poem which I hope will appear in my next book of poems, but I don't know when that'll be.
THE END OF THE AFFAIR
So the cat untwists in midair beneath the apple tree, a blackbird fluttering backwards from her paws as she lands eyes vivid with desire, crouches, wriggles, deliberates, blinks. So, too, an apple springs unbitten from your hand to its twig, unripens from red to green, dwindles to pistil, before it blossoms, folds into bud.
So, too, the car strikes, tyres then brakes screech, your father’s walking stick flying to his grasp as he somersaults to his feet, backs off to his house, goes inside, floats his coat to a hook, sits over the years his hair thickening, darkening,his voice deepening into laughter until he can catch and throw you up to where you smile.
So, too, the scar on your thigh, whose slight ridge I love to touch with a fingertip, widens becoming bluish, livid, pink, minute particles rising to it from wherever you care to limp making a scab, an ooze of droplets, a flow before another’s knife withdraws and heals the jagged tear.
So, too, our lips close on each other’s. So, too, our mouths move apart. So, too, their separate smiles fade. So, too, our eyes look askance. So, too, we step back, turn away. So, too, our heartbeats decelerate. So, too, we don’t blurt out the words. So, too, we don’t decide to risk it. So, too, we are never introduced.
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