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    Arguing with Malarchy
    Arguing with Malarchy
    Arguing with Malarchy
    Ebook101 pages43 minutes

    Arguing with Malarchy

    By Carola Luther

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    About this ebook

    A collection of poetry by South African-born, Yorkshire-based Carola Luther, this account is a chronicle of mourning, renewal, and the realities of human relationships. Addressed to the eponymous Malarchy'—a magical, quarrelsome, and often drunken young boy—these poems explore silences, absences, the unspoken communication between animals and human beings, the pauses and boundaries between what is remembered, forgotten, or invented, the living, and the dead. By turns tender and cantankerous, they also examine the author's homosexuality and sense of migration and displacement.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateAug 1, 2011
    ISBN9781847778871
    Arguing with Malarchy
    Author

    Carola Luther

    Carola Luther's first two collections, Walking the Animals (2004) and Arguing with Malarchy (2011) were published by Carcanet Press. Walking the Animals was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection. Herd, a pamphlet of poems, was published by The Wordsworth Trust where Carola was Poet in Residence in 2012. She was born in South Africa but now lives in the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.

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      Book preview

      Arguing with Malarchy - Carola Luther

      I

      Cusp

      I watch the bees slow down the summer

      I watch the bees slow down the summer. Honeysuckle sink

      beneath their substance. Sunlit busbies stuffed with sleep

      and ochre powder making journeys, wavery, vague,

      full of just-remembered purpose, so I come to think

      of aged gardeners, with their pots and hats and secret

      pockets full of dust, casting stuff on yellow air so seconds

      stretch (a whole long summer each, if we could only enter them)

      a gift of sorts, for us, a hunch, as if they’ve guessed, the bees,

      and understood the rock at the garden’s end, the crouching

      sky, the path on its narrow belly, dropping to the sea.

      Afterwards

      get out of town, driving your car fast along the new ring road,

      going west for a mile and swerving hard left at the junction,

      following the diversion for a few hundred yards to the crossroads,

      turning right, and right again over the bridge, before the sharp

      left corner which you take swiftly, changing down a gear

      as you twist between pylons to make the short cut

      through the disused warehouse, heading in the direction

      of the road to the sea, and here you’ll pick up

      the first lane you come to, which appears to turn inland

      but doubles back in fact upon itself, bringing you out

      several miles on between a quarry and a V-shaped spinney

      of trees, and just a little further, in unkempt countryside

      you can slow right down, looking for where a shadow of a track

      meets the lane at a mound, and bear left here, and keep bearing

      left, continuing through woods to a clump of the darkest

      and most silent pines, and when it feels possible, and in the distance

      you begin to think it probable that the moors will open out

      on every side, bring the vehicle to a stop, anywhere

      where a pool of sunlight may be found. Turn off the engine

      and look at your hands. Look at the sun on your knuckles,

      the folds and grooves of skin over the joints

      of your fingers, the way the veins rise above the fine

      hand-bones like tributaries of a dark grey river,

      how two grey branches almost meet between the third finger

      and the fourth, how the shadows plummet here

      into the ravine between them, how going over the edge

      in a small canoe would contact rock-white water

      drumming through the rapids in the rolling dark

      plunging in and out of the roar of the river and turning

      over, and over, and over, and calming right down

      in the slow shallow width of the palm,

      and beginning to drift between reeds of the delta,

      you’ll manoeuvre later through tricky marsh islands,

      and somewhere here disembark and meander

      through dunes to the deep-cut valley of the heart,

      and falling in a basket made of rushes

      you’ll bask in the sun, feeling the thrum

      of the water beneath you bearing you onward

      to the place where the fate line crosses, and allowing

      the hollowed-out log that you now lie down in,

      clothed in the swathes of your white linen clothes,

      you’ll follow the inexorable pull of the current

      towards the slopes of the mountain of Venus,

      and from the summit if you decide to climb it,

      you will see the road carved at the wrist

      glimmering and pale beside ancestral bracelets,

      and life keeping time like the heartbeat of bird

      held in, held together, by a few twig bones,

      the thinnest of skins.

      Julia’s Party

      Little more than ligament

      she swayed

      over her knuckles,

      held up by her stick,

      in her drooping fields of cloth.

      Maxim Maxim

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