Three poems by Chris Emery

Evenings in Hell

‘Let’s play cards,’ he said, crumpled by the pane.
‘Let’s play cards,’ he said, crumpled by the pane.
Seminary light caulks the room. He smokes,

tamping a fag out in his final egg.
‘You know Tam and Beryl?’ Here we both nod.
It is eight and evening learns its bruises.

‘How did we ever save that fog?’ No new
hours arrive, our day piles in its corner.
The dark horses sing and books pour their dust

into my thinning man. I light a fire
and sing, or half sing, about green wild lanes,
about a knock from the girl, a dead boar,

a white hart in some luscious August field.
How do we make old endings depend here?
The air tastes of wheat. The door is fathoms

deep and the world has not despaired. Hold on,
keep on dear mouths, for the clocks are full
and our shoes are dry and we may yet take
old stars from heaven’s plate, new stars from hell’s.

Them Situationals

‘I want to get back to when life mattered,’
is how Jimi started. ‘How you fail is really
when the grace kicks in.’
                                        I watch him bend
between pot plants, teasing ochre bedding
from the grey stacks, twisting in his rusted trowel
through lumps of clay. ‘I hate to dwell on this.
It’s over when you notice it; one day you’re
in the middle, and then the middle ends.’
‘Getting old,’ I laugh.
                              ‘Yeah. Well, I ain’t old yet.’
Jimi bends away and tucks his shirt tails
back into his pants. His corduroys are loose
on thick green suspenders. I see his hands are grey
and filthy with another hour of working.
‘I ought to have expected it.’ ‘What’s that?’ I say.
‘The ash of hope. Dis-inspiration’s what I mean,
a calling ain’t the same as making up a life.’
‘Do you regret it? Wasting all them years lying
to yourself?’
                    ‘It ain’t lying if you do the work.
You gotta waste your days somehow, ain’t you?’
He flashes me a glance beneath those heavy
brows and smiles. We laugh a little then.
‘It mostly doesn’t matter what you do,
or how hard you do it. When your grandmother
was alive, God bless her, we would drive out
fast from here, make out in the woods, rinse off
in the east river back of Ron Shaughnessy’s place,
and later, count some stars; we never knew
their names. I think I learned a lot back then,
about those common joys, what I like to call
the situationals. The things we don’t just live among,
but in, the life inside the things we see.
This being in it is the most important thing
for us. Heck, time don’t matter much. That happens
anyways. How much of it, how little, you know,
that stuff is all distraction. There’s a tiny space
inside the world for you to sort of occupy.
But there’s a lot of framing too. You gotta see past
all the framing to the essence of your task.
That sort of work don’t get much notice.
You won’t get no mentions or no bylines
in the dailies, nothing like that. It ain’t about
them fashions for the complex points or them
fashions for the simplest line of thinking
anyone can muster. Saying something easy
ain’t a virtue – no how, no way. But saying
what is hard in one way fully graspable,
but not fully comprehensible, that’s tough,
and it won’t win you friends, no plaudits neither,
or money down at Ron’s for a shot of whiskey.’

Jimi stops to rub his back, he turns to look at me.
‘Them situationals is what you’ve got to work on.
The rest of it is dirt.’
                                 Then he gets back to things,
pressing in the trowel, picking out the dead leaves
from the seeds that seem to matter.

The Small Life

Mother said, ‘Learn to love a small life,’
between these weak rivers, ruptured fields
where grey sheep fill the view of St Mary’s.
A life that hands you down its silty
pea field with that fence no one can mend,
and livestock that won’t cost too much.
The virtues of a small life, mother insisted,
ought to involve a diligent tidy marriage
you never managed to supply yourself
and short fat neighbours aplenty,
of whom there are none,

a loyal sheepdog called Thaxton
you never bought from Kenning’s Farm,
and family jinx set down on a hundred sheets
in red boxes you never purchased.
It didn’t happen, the small life,
but love it still, you do, as Mother wanted.
Now you sit on a blind porch at midnight
with a tiny roll-up that flakes and falls
in your brandy, in the tin cup Mother left,
so full of flies you cannot drink it.

Chris Emery was born in Manchester in 1963. He has published four collections of poetry, a writer ’s guide, an anthology of art and poems, and edited selections of Emily Brontë, John Keats and Christina Rossetti. He works in publishing and lives in Cromer, North Norfolk. Wonder is his fifth collection of poetry.