The following is a selection of recent poems by Nichola Deane.
“Le Sang d’un Poète” is from a sequence of poems about Lee Miller.
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Le Sang d’un Poète (1931)
‘In a state of grace we participated in the making of a poem.’ Lee Miller
Cocteau shoots a sleepwalk of a film
Where I’m his moving statue, liquid marble.
His little trick to shock my gaze within
Is painting eyes on eyelids I keep shut.
Shutting out a world I dream a world,
And find— my walled-in landscape’s not enough.
I’m his, a sighted mind led by the hand,
And my palms ache, wanting to be mouths:
But it’s not till later when I’ve led the bull
And drawn a broken map on the beast’s flank
That I make my escape. Riding the swell,
I sail with my lyre and compass and awake.
The Remington Silent
Floating cloud-dark on parachutes,
a typewriter, a Remington I’d dreamt,
landed on me, knocking out my breath.
The round keys were enamelled eyes, perched
On top of winter trees; and the eyes rooted.
A metal breastplate grew, grafting itself
Into my ribs. The words the keyboard made
Flew off into the sky like rooks at sunrise—
Or trickled down like rain in soil to weep
Through all my cells until each nucleus
Held a seraph, hissing his inky name.
Nothing I imagined was forbidden
And so I nursed an ingrown Pentecost.
Transfigured now, I’m pierced, a girl-Sebastian.
Flâneur
(after Rilke)
This is the path that takes me nowhere:
With two meadows either side
It’s barely a path
Just footsteps melting into air.
Long grasses lean across
Whose pollen dusts my legs and seed
From dandelions
Floats by, set loose from globes of lace.
The stile in the hedge is overgrown;
I won’t try yet to push on through
But rest a moment,
Marking the darker season sown.
