I'm really into Helen Mort's poetry at the moment, getting excited for the reading this Thursday at Oliver's Music Bar in Greenwich where she'll be reading with Jack Underwood and other poets. Here is something I've nicked from The Manhattan Review. Talking of The Manhattan Review, the latest edition has some incredible poets in, Penelope Shuttle, George Szirtes, Carol Ann Duffy and Roddy Lumsden. So, buy that, and also come on Thursday.
Anyway, here's the poem.
A Bear in the City of Bicycles.
I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear.
When I brought him here, they asked me what I meant to do
with him and my reply was "he should sit for a fellowship"...
The answer delighted them not.
-Byron, in a letter to Elizabeth Pigot, 1807
I lead him shambling through the backs,
over bridges where he sniffs for pigeons, stands still
to let a north wind chafe him.
On Hobson Street, he paws the gutters
trails a lorry half a mile
for its hoard of brimming bin bags
then swerves to chase a whiff
of vinegar, a green foil butterfly
scattering its salty pollen.
By the cam, he takes each ripple
for the dart of minnows, topples in as punters
topple out of boats and flail for shore.
It's all a game in sunlight. Children
grab at tufts of maple fur, warm their hands
on living velvet.
Market traders offer orange slivers,
gleaming halves of melon,
dusty, bulbous grapes.
His snout drips with livid
pomegranate juice. Even the traffic wardens
pause to smile.
But at sundown, sky bruises, railings
are black spearheads
tipped with frost. The streets are thick
with rangy cats. He moves unseen
through revellers, bone and sinew,
and smells the night acutely-
beer ebbing from dropped bottles
dark and sleek as engine oil. The scent
of girls who slip
through doorways, and into rooms
made sickly with their perfume,
sweet over the musk of sweat.
He pads the center of an empty road,
goes lithe over low walls,
finds the lush and inky gardens
of a college, breathes mint
and lichen, or cool air sharpened
by the scent of wet juniper.
He burrows in the neat grass
for the reek of dampened earth,
tunnels silently
and is watched by no-one.
Only a night-porter shivering by the oak trees
tracing the wake of his own cold breath
twitches at the tremble of a branch,
or gapes at some moving patch
of darkness
and thinks the night is dancing.
Read more of Helen's work here, and you can buy her collection from Tall Lighthouse.