Tanqueray*
Maria Sledmere
When you are close to someone sleeping, you realise
there is always a pulse, a constant quiver.
Not quite insect-like, but a humming motion
that draws you in for its soft, kinetic warmth.
There is a pleasure to submittable manipulation, to long drawn
talks at four to six in the morning. Nothing else
is quite worth living for, not the star chips of ice
nor a slice for the sake of colour. It was a wonderful splash.
What goes deep are the secret roots, things
you can’t identify in strangers. I could brush my thumb
with yellow pen, grow luminous and sing
for the sake of maple faces, lovely money.
It doesn’t get much better than the thought of him
curled cat-like in self-protection, even the strong curves
contribute to vulnerability. Toasted curls. As if
you could crush with ribs the worry. My eyes
are not green like his, except on sunny days
with lilac shadow. Up north, the weather is colder
and rain falls slow like a limited sand preserved in an hour-glass
waiting to land and instate new worlds.
The architecture there is all towering shadow.
He says, as we part: it’s not home, it’s not home.
If it’s death you prefer, the honest work of mourning.
In the morning it is all different: while I still pick
cotton candy from the fringe of my senses,
he panics blindly. Walking back alone
with the shakes, my arabesque breath of whisky
warmed, I recall only the faint vibration
of his lashes, later the frustrated tying of laces
as if tightening string could solve things.
It is a miracle, if only useless, turned over
as the variant sapphire latticing
of the night impressed by milk light, by day
and ever the implications of ever.
“I was interested in how ‘intransitive’ might be a procrastinatory directive for desire, a sense of skewing the perceptive lines. This is a landscape poem, a love poem that resides in the space between objects, loosening the cooled ink of impossible spirit. In these lines I hope there’s a sense of climatic strangeness, an attunement to sensory oscillations which divert the self across itself in the act of reading/writing.”
Maria Sledmere (MA, MLitt) is a Glasgow-based writer and critic. She is founder of Gilded Dirt, an online publication centred on the poetics of waste, is assistant editor of the post-internet poetry zine, SPAM, and a regular contributor to music blogs Ravechild and GoldFlakePaint. Recently she collaborated with producer Lanark Artefax on a new materialist-inspired exhibition titled The Absent Material Gateway, sponsored by the Red Bull Music Academy. Recent work can be found in Adjacent Pineapple, Datableed, L’Éphémère Review, Fluland, From Glasgow to Saturn, Numéro Cinq, Occulum, Thistle Magazine and Zarf. She tweets @mariaxrose.
