poem: your dress whispering its gossip (Simon Stanley)

Finally another posting from the Two Rivers anthology Confluence. Simon Stanley is a newish member of the group, and brings a quiet assurance and sensitivity to everything he writes. The first poem I ever read of his, on the strength of which I invited him to join us, stays in my memory as a felt experience of his particular blend of landscape, natural history, human resilience and vulnerability, and the layers of prehistory which underpin our lives. Simon, brought up on a farm, brings to all his poetry the sense of kinship with the land. Simon has worked with various causes in relation to social justice and such like, and is currently working for Sustrans, the pioneering sustainable transport organisation which is opening up, for instance, cycle paths in the UK.

The Quiet House

‘Rain, moving South, clearing…’

There the mouth of the glen

is open to the sky,

the scourging water a lament to the coming night.

Wreathes of cloud bodice the high fells,

fingers of mist petticoat fields of scree

in drenched silk.

The slanting light burns like blood,

like whisky in peat water, the autumn oaks

forging iron before the falling dark.

But you are with me here, in the quiet house,

your dress whispering its gossip to your skin,

the long range of your body flickering.

You will be naked, open again to the passage

of earth light, wind life, rain falling

like a grey shroud to your pale pearl skin.

The storm is coming, skewing the light,

bending the hills, testing the trees,

rattling the house bones,

tilting the bed of Earth to its passions.

Simon Stanley