Pam Thompson

Friendship

#reverb10 Friendship My friends lit last year like steady burning candles that will never melt.

Five-minute memories #reverb 10 Day 15 You only have 5 minutes to recall memories from last year before your memory goes-do so-now. The year: snowflakes in hair, wrong paths, fur coat, Toledo station, Aldeburgh, starburst rockets, black sky, black sea. Word! My son, smiling, making jokes, Gaughin’s surprising early paintings in Tate Modern. Unexpected Weather,…

Lovelinesses

I’m having a go at #reverb 10 along with Alison and Steve Day 14 About gratitude Grasp I’m too grasping for gratitude though my god I’m grateful my god I’m grateful the people I love are hanging on the sides of this planet. Well, not all of them. And where did my dead go, where…?…

Hard Copy

I’m Day 13 following Ivory and Steve with #Reverb 10 posts here: Hard Copy Year, like soap, softened, sweet-smelling, sometimes, like citrus, snuffed candles’ after-burn, hot wax, congealing. Year of wax. Year of hugs and hands. Year of hospitals, pills; the here and there of appointments. Christmas on the ward tree with gold baubles, young…

Moth-light

Have you got the moth-light? No, where is it? It’s hanging up on the ceiling. I can’t see it. You need the moth-light. Why? Because it’s dark . Where is it? On the ceiling Can you see it? No. You need the moth-light. I

Snow Daze

When you look for too long at white you begin to see colours. Your eyes have been snowed in. Listen to the weather report. Swirls of indigo are sweeping across East Yorkshire. Clouds of carmine are banking above the M1 near Sheffield . Flashes of veridian have disrupted traffic on the A6 south of Market Harborough….

Soft Tissue

I haven’t posted here for a while so am doing something about it. Soft Tissue A woman turns her head, her former lover turns towards a tall tree disguised as a woman, the tree bowed two branches like the enfolded arms of a geisha, the geisha turned towards the bamboo screen, the bamboo screen…

May

May (after James Schuyler) I’m squinting at the horizon. The sun I can’t see but its hands are on me even though I’m not outside. I’m leaning over a balcony in New York even though I’ve never been there and I won’t be going next month. I remember the first of April as…

As We Don’t Know

As We Don’t Know (after John Ashbery) All that we feel is permeated by it – Cherry-blossom, yes, that old pastoral let’s not mention, get all Japanese, think of wedding fixtures; arcing trees. You presented to me your city which was not a city but was my city and I gave you everything that wasn’t…

The shadow-children’s birthing partner cracks under the strain

The shadow-children’s birthing partner cracks under the strain It’s an accomplishment, this slipping through the eye of a blade of glass, a grass pane crack, down a ginnel, past a church slime wall without looking up towards tonight’s moon which is always full and extra weight deems you earthbound, your white moon belly with its…