Luce Lovell: ‘Cankerblossom’ and ‘Notes for a Lecture’

Cankerblossom

So where was I in all this, loitering
amid hyacinths and trying to remember
the movements of desire that terrified me
more than hell or the fact I no longer believed
in Christ’s long embrace. It was twenty-eighteen.

________It was Monday.

I was bipedal and awkward,
the canary in a diamond mine.
What use is there for warning calls
when danger glitters in the macro-
structures of a lifetime? I never cared for
Deleuze or Guattari to my friend’s dismay.
Instead, I would dream of getting railed
on a linear bridge, or charting out a life
at relevant checkpoints over the Stour.
Something to return to once the worst
had passed. The shadows & breakages.
I won’t get lost in the rhizome. Not again.
Not again. And once again, I lapse out
at the kindest people I know.

________It was Thursday.

Let’s say that culture precedes all proceeding
into whatever is popular in contemporary
play-acting; take it in your hands for better
times or say you remind me of a Bolshevik
or a French intellectual. But I’m lost again,
getting ahead of myself by a fair few years.
Didn’t bother giving myself investment advice.
Squandering without hope of return is a hobby
that keeps me busy; keeps the hands wringing
and the brow furrowed. The poems will come.
I’ve got that to look forward to and day brightens
over water. One day I’ll see beautiful swimmers
in border waters; they will be my touchstones
when I talk about the breakdowns.

________It was Saturday.

The day brightens up. I smile a little.
I’m incorporating poems into the day,
which is a cliche and lovely way to live.
Hope for the week comes as a small
mercy, as a June afternoon, as lemon
or lime, as shame and its shadow can’t
survive on a sunny day. Say weekends
were made by unions for heartbreaking
bravery, say you’re trying to be braver.
I’ve been trying that for a decade,
I let the results speak for themselves.

________It was Friday.

Loop around the worst days of a week.
Looks like a bender. Trauma has a price tag,
it’s banded to severity & bleak narrative.
Recovery is slow & nigh-on impossible
under self-medication or so the clipped
pronunciation tells me. Like life in a fabled
new build. My own research is flawed
in multitudinous ways, but I learn some
small things. If you drink to aid sleep
& block nightmares then days blur & love
hardens to pity. I like my love soft as moss,
like in that one Jon Silkin poem I’ll read
& think is beautiful, more beautiful than
whatever else I could get my heart around.

________It was Wednesday.

I’m back in Canterbury, imploding with a care
less fashion & raised hackles, short & brutal.
Hostile passions arouse like cankerblossoms,
still visible in the hedgerows & a love affair.
There is no apparent trigger pattern to this
so I got on one knee, half-cut, to hear a yes.
Silly child, put your hand & face down again.
Two weeks is long enough to fall in love, yes,
but not for the two bodies on this bridge.
I see a florid stone in water, I think of this
time a friend will call me a little beauty.
I carry it around in my breast pocket.

________It was Tuesday.

I say limp behaviours ricochet into languid lives,
too full of love. It sings a little easier. Takes practice
which makes a perfect circle. I’m practicing it now
after learning how to tell a trench joke in French
about market integration for this body politique,
circling back around to anxieties around ‘sociality’.
I thought love was just desire reciprocal, now
I don’t know what to think. I haven’t for five years.
I’ve never been good at pronouncing joy. Still
terrible at knowing how to reciprocate all this.

________It was Sunday.

Sector by sun-sector, I’ve been scouring my life.
I’ve been talking to hedges & ghosts, dogs & gulls.
I’ve tried to find the right tonality, a comfortable
gender configuration, & some small way to piece
the disparate joys of a decade spent exhausted.
Wrote long emails. Smiled at the wrong moments.
Bought my friends’ pamphlets & read them to tears.
Felt comfortable as a jester & fell in love with myself.
I would not recognise myself now. That feels right.

Notes for a Lecture
after Stephen Rodefer

i

I have never understood the sexual appeal of poets
& most of them are too intense, which is fine by me
because I’m one of the numbers too, numbed burr
of a line poem, can you tell I’ve been reading Rodefer
again, my head cloudy with debt to handsome dead
men that look too good to be true, I’m sure they were
pricks to be around which is still fine by me, I’m one
to talk, doing my busy work with debt & a cruel streak.

ii

This is the first time I’ve not carried love around
like a dusty pigeon in a cage, what did Zbigniew
say about one word in exchange for metaphors,
I imagine it must sound something like breaking
plates or their hands in the hair of someone else,
which I’m happy for, I believe that, in the evenings
when I look out the window into the graveyard
& hear young foxes bickering with the corvids.

iii

So there is a collective effort to live, shared around
in mottled & rippling hands, an ineffective elective
that’ll never see the other side of a day, it’s too
complicated to write with regularity on a life
spent in hanging smoke, on the road alongside
Jølstravatnet, singing with the White Wagtails
& Swedish Cornels, it leaves you a little stun
locked, you can’t even remember to write at all.

iv

I’m laughing & lying again, not about joy
but that it wouldn’t work, to live together
sharing around the same five quid for poems
& bread & our remembered awkwardness,
I’ll keep saying that love is the law, keep on
flitting about, flirting with dirtbags & friends,
keep on at this thing called ‘earnestness’,
I do believe that would be a good life.