hook
a hook for an eye
this ribbon for a slip
there’s a pigeon in the pot
and tree makes the room
your foot on the boards
your head in the sky
no mind if your stockings snag
are splinter-caught
the red thread
frayed or snag
walk now on swollen feet
on feet that are bound-in
with red and orange
with stocking threads
these can be mended
these can be made whole again
you wouldn’t even
notice the tear
spool
red thread unravels in its wooden box
sepulchred with:
loose sequins
button-bones
needles
wires
a furled tape measure
theres a jawed scissors for cutting rough cloth and linen-stuffs
I am two:
my bisection is equatorial
not a vertical splice or gather-to
walking broken-footed does little for my mermaid humour
I’d rather lie in three: head torso and bottom-half :
but they disallow me the luxury
they have made this dress for me
their cunning craft formed the exsosexo skeleton
of my thigh-gap emblazoned with its stone whorl
© Chris Murray 2016, 2021
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Tag: the blind
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sans it is all ceremony it is all the cloths all gathered-in it is white tailor’s chalk in a neat triangle it is the blanket-stitch before the machine it is the neighbour woman with her bone-pick pulling stitches one by one from the curtain lining the [bone-pick] is ivory coloured a little larger than a [tooth-pick] nubbed to cradle under the silks and lift them up so she can snip it at the ties the little knot hidden in back of the material stretched out across her knees is silver the thread is doubled-to her material is some floral-stuff on white laid onto a cream skirting she will rinse it out in cold water later and hang it on the monday line the blue-blue rope of the monday line the length of material is clean / sweaty from her handiwork she will hang it over the gauze of her nets which are always immaculate her effort is blind she does not need eyes to feel her work her gathering-to of the pleats Copyright 2013 Chris Murray Published Southword Online URL http://www.munsterlit.ie/Southword/Issues/25/murray_christine.html Collected The Blind, Oneiros Books, 2013
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Seed Willow, cut to its hidden houses. Something secret furls unfurls its stem-self seed slopes slews under crystal skin (its) flesh blooms to tone – coralling a milky alumben in water’s distress, floats, |stays| alive winds its silver thread in brine – fleshed frond & secret, still – a silver thread pulls-up willow’s ochre curtain. Truncated cut, yet I saw it — willowGrove willowGrief — winter / flower / blossoms lie on wet ground bereft of their generations seed will lie | seed will lie | Copyright Chris Murray, 2021 First published Timber Literary Journal, September 2021 Online URL: https://timberjournal.org/archive/seed
a note about the text
the poem seed responds to a series of poems (seed, cells, hunger) first published in the blind (2013). I have taken the blind out of circulation as I am working with the text at this time.
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hunger outside the ragged bird tears dead flies from the window nets and it is not clothed right - it claws the glass suspend I from the mirror architrave float down silken threads they are not blackened yet from the branches they reach down laden with fruit out on the limb birds beat them for their dessicated meat making sweetmeats for desperate bills a man is clipping the edges with steel season’s treachery suspend I from the mirror architrave float down silken threads they are not blackened yet from the ceiling hooks float down wisps of red thread - almost cobweb light she is arched back unsure whether to suspend burnt orange silks cover the shutters there are children in the street she is nonetheless quite bound-up in red ropes from loop at nape and length of torso it is peaceful, still. being spider-rolled webbed-in and arched as if. a bird swoops down behind the orange silks shiftshape-in suspend I as if she were an exotic fruit a seed caught in breeze from the mirror architrave float down silken threads they are not blackened yet cobweb light she is arched back unsure whether to suspend in the red threads that loop at her nape down the length of her torso dividing and opening her out achingly if she moves the threads will tighten the harpies are perched in the suicide-trees
ceremony the red rope is looped around the neck and brought down the back to the bra-line it tightly binds across the top of the chest and is looped down to the cunt lips separating them held-to and pulled in the back arches back bow-bent as if its wood had seasoned in an iron girder above hot embers and released steam onto a still lake the hook retracts when the dress slides into a blue ripple onto the boards there are six hooks embedded into the ceiling stockings catch up the desert breeze on a small balcony , a strip of silk portholes the room and sutras are tacked into the walls the hooks do not look as if they could carry the weight of an inert body spider-rolled silk-skeined red-cocooned the bird panics spider-fruits from under dry eaves these net-webs are laden with the small dead best not to move he is demented with hunger. © C. Murray 2013, 2021 Copyright 2013 Chris Murray Published Ditch Poetry Online URL https://www.ditchpoetry.com/christinemurray.htm Collected The Blind Oneiros Books, 2013
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Thanks to David Mitchell , publisher at Oneiros Books and to poetry editor Michael McAloran, who guided me through publishing my second poetry collection, The Blind.
The Blind is a contemporary poem-tale about The Furies. The themes and symbols of The Blind are entirely interdependent from beginning to end. The book is set out as a tale and employs experimental poetic methods throughout, including cut-up, repetition, symbol and internal rhyme. I did not make use of poetic prose , as I felt that it would be a challenge to tell a tale poetically. I am delighted that the book is now available. I have found it easier to employ these methods in conceiving book-length poem-tales since I began working in this manner, and to this end I have initiated another project in a similar vein.
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Thanks to Amos Gideon Grieg , publisher at A New Ulster Magazine, who previewed some of the poems from The Blind this past summer. The series published at A New Ulster was entitled Hooks, Ceremony and Hunger.
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Thanks to Ditch Poetry, who featured Suspend I from The Blind in their magazine.
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Thank you to the editor of Southword Literary Journal (Munster Literature Centre) who will publish poems from The Blind in the Winter 2013 issue of Southword.
- I am adding here the Poetry Catalogue for Oneiros Books , which I recommend . I have reviewed some of the books. They are a growing outfit with a talented team of editors, specialising is prose, poetry and comics.
- I am adding here the purchase link for The Blind; a tale of
I am delighted with The Blind, for me it was an opportunity to tell a story that I have not been afforded within the Irish Publication system , which is narrowly conceived and not open to experimentalism, save in few independent presses. Poetry as form is vital in Ireland, yet there are few opportunities to develop as a poet. I hope that this changes and that editors see the value of opening out more platforms for experimentation for our writers.
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shadows
the three are shadows
silken spider-weavers
hidden close by a laurel tree
they cast out their silvers like fishing line with baited
hooks / food for worms
they cast out their silver threads they draw them back in
red and frayed / time weary
some say that they sit behind mirrors watching lives
pass through a room :
that they spindle their thread/ that they are blind /that
they are simply bent to the work that they were given
and never a stitch is dropped /
that is not picked up and brought clean again / for they
simply do their job
by touch by hand by long and patient experience with
the vagaries of man
.and woman,
.unleash the skein
red thread the open wound
and from it a thin red rivulet
will drain into a metal dish
and curl into water
no more now
it is just a stitch
stitches
wound gash is drawn to and threaded
dust of glass in the wound ground in
round the heel and spiral down to
blue glass pummelled beyond crystal
a useless moon dust
pounded to glass
the red thread lets
no light in.the shards are so small,
Shadows and Unleash The Skein are from a forthcoming book, The Blind. © C. Murray
Unleash The Skein was first published in Three Red Things, Smithereens Press, June 2013
Chris Murray 