A Lovely Sense of Closure - Poems by Andrew Taylor

A LOVELY SENSE OF CLOSURE AND THE FREEDOM TO REIN YOU IN

back from the edge, where the waterfall's spray coats
your skin. Oh to be in Wales in the Autumn! When the sky

threatens to crack and take you with it, remember the candles
lit in your honour, bottom left. I always choose left over right

an odd trait from 1980s Liverpool, turning left at the bottom
of the stairs at the Everyman Bistro into the melee of familiar

Friday faces, The Blue Nile oozing from the Third Room.

After rain freshness. Trackside fences littered with amber,
reflections cast off polished rails, diesel pools a rainbow.

This Autumn age! Comfort of dark nights and neon. The
city draws in river mist, halos round street lights



AMARI

How I love the smell of Autumn in the morning.
Wind throws spent leaves in a merry dance,
power cables whistle in time. As the storm
gathers in, a train pulses by on a grey horizon.

A heater clicks in Room 111 of the Days Inn,
Bristol West. Workplace shelf cleared, neutrality
brushed aside. Make a mark! capture the image,
the M5 at its rush-hour best.

Light streaks luminous outside lane. Air-condition
cold swirls through service station view. Nature
and human interaction, hard shoulder borders
ripple with nocturnal creatures.

October mist descends like a shroud, brings evening
on board. Journey through carved country, picturing
the view of cows from bridges, that cross to shelter
and dream of daybreak.


Andrew Taylor is a Liverpool based poet and co-editor of erbacce and erbacce-press. His latest collection comes from Sunnyoutside Press, Buffalo. Check out Andrew's website.

Gower Road and Fall: Poems by Cliff Yates

GOWER ROAD

He dreams all day of a crowded party,
strangers dancing round his room
with the sink in the corner

and American
novels on the mantelpiece.
All he has to do is lie there

every possible future
at that moment before him.

Rain streams down an inside wall
loosening the plaster.
We gather downstairs in the sitting room

with the landlord’s piano
then it’s Saturday Night, the gateway
to Sunday Morning

by Velvet Underground and Nico
the one with the banana on the cover.



FALL

The tablets work but send him to sleep
though when he can make it, the eight inch reflector
is manoeuvrable, so that’s a blessing,
what with the dodgy hip and that hill of a garden

and bearing in mind that time observing Mars
when he stepped back off the low stone wall
at three in the morning and lay sprawled
on the rockery and January frost
calling softly for help while the guinea-pigs
trembled in the corner of their hutch

or after the Beer Festival, when he opened
the door pulling into Southampton, stepped off
the train before it stopped, fell and rolled on his back
after insisting that all the commemorative
glasses go in his rucksack because
he’s the mature student, he’s the sensible one.


Cliff Yates is the author of Henry's Clock (winner of the Aldeburgh first collection prize and the Poetry Business book & pamphlet competition). A new collection, Frank Freeman's Dancing School, is forthcoming from Salt. Cliff's website - www.cliffyates.co.uk