[James Midgley]

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Holiday Phrasebook

The heat of midday is the heat inside a word
like flint, or a phrase like walled garden
where a groundsman leans asleep
against a tree, limbs tucked onto the island
of its shade, like a well-organised spider.
Firewood not quite catching alight

lies at his feet, snakelike in the buttery light.
Light is a word that sheds another word:
shadow, which subtitles lizards
that can't rest in this or any garden
whose pavings are a disassembled oven. Island
spirits may huddle in the groundsman’s sleeping

head, but mine is full of this heat and his sleeping.
No snake stirs from the bonfire’s future light
and even falling apples seem slow to land.
Where was I? -- What was the first word, the logos
that got me started? If this were truly that garden
you’d have to fetch some water, rouse the serpent

with a cold draught and the cool pink of a mouse.
Out on the balcony I’m teetering on sleep,
a slow pulse aligning with the crickets’ gardening
shears. I’m poring over a phrasebook: la luz,
jardín, isla. My salted flesh is a foreign word
like any other. It lives under me like scorched land

while my mind runs aground on a different isle
where Odysseus’s men were translated into swine --
were spelt. Their fatty skin still gleamed with words
they had no use of, finding themselves in the deep sleep
of another's waking head, set alight
by squealing aphasia in the witch goddess’s garden.

We are all born pink and squealing to such a garden
is what I’m grandly thinking, but the heat of the island
melts the thought around my head’s unlit
and piggledy innards. Inside, no creature
gathers itself up, neither wakes nor sleeps --
instead there is a babble of words-not-words

inside one garden inside many heads human and animal,
each island taken under by the depth-charge of sleep
into blood: blood-heat, blood-light, emptiful of words.


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[Glenn Wright]

Hi, James—

I like the liberties you took with the sestina form. I have never been able to write a successful sestina because I get too caught up in the web of repeated words. By translating the repetends into different languages and metamorphosing the animals, you not only give yourself some compositional freedom, but also reinforce your theme of poetry arising from a warm, foreign, sleepy, magical place in the poet’s mind. Enjoyable.

Glenn

[Carl Copeland]

James, I’ve been settling into this poem over many readings and enjoying it more every time. The words being studied weave a spider’s web of sleepy associations, and the sestina structure keeps every word in play, reemerging in new contexts in new forms and figurations, which is how language develops—poetically! (“Aphasia” points me back to Jakobson’s pertinent article.) I’d interpret the meltdown of meaning and thought in S5-6, the “babble of words-not-words,” as the poetic bubbling cauldron of all language, though I’m still wondering about the bloodbath in the last line. In the words of Mayakovsky, “Yes, you’ve got something here!”