Mengham - Chance of a Storm

Rod Menghams published poetry includes Unsung: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2001), Parleys and Skirmishes (Ars Cameralis, 2007), Bell Book (Wide Range, 2012), The Understory (Corrupt Press, 2014), Paris by Helen (Oystercatcher, 2014) and with Marc Atkins a book of texts and film stills, Still Moving (Veer, 2014). He is also the publisher of Equipage, Reader in Modern English Literature at Cambridge University and Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College, Cambridge. He has published monographs and edited collections of essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, violence and avant-garde art, the 1940s, and contemporary poetry. He has co-edited the anthologies Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (2003) and Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2005). His translations include Andrzej Sosnowskis Speedometry (Contraband, 2014).

ROD MENGHAM

Batavia, in Critical Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 3 (Autumn 2003).

Terra Infirma, in The Literary Review: an international journal of contemporary writing (Winter 2005) vol. 48, no. 2.

9/11, Santiago, in The Liberal, (February/March, 2005).

Lady with Vermin, in These Pages Are Marked By Women: Anthology of the Contemporary Womens Poetry Festival 2006, ed. Emily Critchley and Neil Pattison.

The Westralipede, Delivering the Device, After Archilochus, in Rod Mengham, Diving Tower (Equipage, 2006).

Five Year Plan in Four Years / Plan quinquennal en quatre ans [translation by Philippe Demeron], in Les Citadelles: revue de posie, no. 14 (Paris, 2009).

The Debauchery of Nuances, in Cambridge Literary Review, vol.1, no.1 (Michaelmas, 2009).

Bend the Bow, in Cambridge Literary Review, vol.1, no.2 (Lent 2010).

Five Portraits, in Les Citadelles: revue de posie, no. 15 (Paris, 2010).

Engineering Works, Ad Nauseam, Repeat This, in Veer About (Veer, no. 37), ed. Adrian Clarke and William Rowe (London: 2011).

Nature and Costumes, in Blackbox Manifold, no. 6 (March, 2011): www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk

Coal Train Still Life and Suffixes, in The Second Annual Sussex Poetry Festival Magazine, ed. Laura Gadsden and Joe Luna (Brighton: 2011).

Icarus Alight, in Les Citadelles: revue de posie, no. 17 (Paris, 2012).

To Repeal the Spoils, in Island, no. 130 (Tasmania, 2012).

Diary of an Imperial Surgeon, in The Warwick Review, vol. VII, no. 2 (June, 2013).

Assange Militia, On the Formation of Splinter Groups, Canticle of the Rivets, Tweeze That, Someone Just Walked Over My, Love in Avarice, in PN Review 215, vol. 40, no. 3 (JanuaryFebruary, 2014).

Klangfarbenmelodie, Will o the Wisp, Mayo Mayo, Herne, in Rod Mengham, The Understory (Edinburgh: Corrupt Press, 2014).

Fears Before Bedtime, Translation, One is not a Number, Through a

Blow-Pipe, A Communication-Cord Touched by the Unknown, A Crate of Empties, in Paris by Helen (Old Hunstanton: Oystercatcher Press, 2014).

Prairie Rose, in Visual Verse, vol. 1 (April, 2014): www.visual-verse.org

Occasional Inuit, in The Polar Muse supplement, PN Review 220 (NovemberDecember, 2014).

The Commission, in outLINES: From the Small Press (University of Westminster, 2015).

The Cloak and Turned to Tongue, in PN Review 222 (MarchApril, 2015).

The author wishes to thank the editors of all these journals and also John Kinsella, Dylan Harris and Peter Hughes, the editors of Wide Range Chapbooks, Corrupt Press and Oystercatcher Press, respectively.

nothing is out of this world

or beyond the pale since Zeus

found night in the blue of days

left the sun at a nonplus

made men forever twitchy

now anything and everything

springs from the box

so what if the beasts of the field

leap in the sea like dolphins

the spouting waves are a charm to the ears

but not where the dolphins are

at rest in their mountain hideaway

This portico was meant for the Sea Gate at Djakarta, but the eleven blocks of its arch and two Doric pillars never arrived, never came ashore. For most of the last 350 years they were loosely adjacent among the swells of the Indian Ocean. Now the shapes of individual column sections are all different. Flaws in the stone, areas of more or less hardness and resistance, open up and give way to pockets of memory, crypts for the imaginations of architect and mason. When their tools were laid out in the morning, they would pause before setting to work, close their eyes and conjure up a city, a forum teeming with men and music, the cries of shopkeepers, the chanting of processions, the baying of spectators in the amphitheatre. They would close their ears, but the gates were all shut, it was dark, the streets were hushed when the rain began, pattering in the dust, drops of blood from an unnamed cloud, in the lights and shadows of a different sky, where the circling stars follow old paths now forgotten.

It was a time to sow and a time for the radio signals to break up. The migrants would never return. The planes were all taxiing up and down the runway in a perfect boustrophedon. There were foraging parties disappearing into the hills, and in the middle distance a great plain where every citizen worked with a mattock, watched by the leader from a white pavilion. They would scratch a living in the time it takes for the songs of loss to change tune. All roads in the city led to that gate, but only one path led away from it, where streamwater ran through the grass and out among corals.

The gate did not know this, it would dream of another place, where the sound of bees comes down the chimney and the fields are prepared for dancing, where the crashing of waves is a distant lulling, and the patterns travelling over drifting sand are marbled, like the shadows cast from a great plane tree in the breeze of early spring.

With his last hand, the builder poured in the sea, and the ship sailed on to the studio wall. Beyond it was slaughter, the rescuers killing the rescued. Like the Shield of Achilles, the gate was forged for enmity and rage, locked into place with the New Century, in the rhythm of a march, of a pace-maker with armour plate. The admirable shield is hung up or laid down, the immoveable chockstone in an underwater gulley, perishing slowly like old soap, cleansing nothing but itself in the empire of tides.

Past the drowned roots of flooded gums, past the dead palm branches laid out like narwhal spikes, walking towards the coldest star in the southern sky when all virtue is exhaled, they are tearing up Newcastle Street in the next chapter of The Revolutionary History of Perth. Beneath the pavements other pavements. Or in Little Asia, Chinese clothes are on western mannequins and the Resistance Centre is closed, the Salvation Army is closed, the Rechabite Hall is closed, even the Daughters of Charity Bargain Box Closing Down Sale is closed. Three pleasure boats keep abreast on the lake, one of them rowed by two men with shaved heads and gold ear-rings. The man in the bows, image-spitting at the lakes surface, stares intently down into its depths, looking for evidence of the one-armed man last seen leaving the apartment. Three other men with brickbats wait under the flying buttresses of a Moreton Bay Fig tree, twisting the handles of their clubs. It is 6.00 pm, time for the first meeting of the Committee for Summer, convened by a bunch of peevish crows, wheezing like Mr Punch in a final attempt at a wolf-whistle. On this side of the tracks there are pre-paid funerals only, but I sit and listen to the eulogies on Dorothy Hewett 12 days after her death, watching a cortge of minuscule ants bear away the corpse of a black many-legged insect I do not know the name of. If I write less, I claim less against tax, while you pay more, although less for heat, light, etc. while reading this. Like the Amphisbaena, all texts here are double-headers: one to bite them that read, the other to sting him that writes.