Four Poems
By Scott Thurston.
from Sustainability
***
In a relational incident to give,
to put oneself in service to others,
begs a reversal. But in danger
the rescue force draws nearer.
An absolute escape route holds
the position in expectation of its
realisation. Seek a wild line:
aerial, detached, wavering, deviating.
In creating a new threshold of suspicion
a fifteen blade iris seeks mortal images:
to imagine that which we know.
His will is in the law, so our chance lies
in unlikeness. Make a stab at
the heart – system refutation tight.
***
You forgot that the tree
keeps growing in your absence –
why describe this scarf or
stitch wildness into pattern?
Shape of a rusted chain-link fence
the rough representations unfinished –
the future influencing the present
as an active ghost.
Shocking glance off a glance
in a significance consistent
with the whole, hunted
in an empty circle. In the will
of the arbitrary how to mount to
the clean line of flight?
***
Wanting courage to embrace peace
in the press of moor and tongue.
The landscape convulses in fear –
looking back up into the dragon’s throat.
A light block to a heavy blow,
Resistance in this flickering world.
Choice, balance and turning calmly
to overthrow the pieces of process.
The grace of humility, its necessity:
dancing as if everyone is watching,
caught out in front of the real
with and against your ego.
Making way inside, leaving space
to introduce the offerings.
***
How swift the moral equilibrium of the universe
when you take too much responsibility.
Out of isolation comes cut-throat rhetoric –
past wounds unworthy of your death.
The difference between release and acceptance,
the relation between feet and hands,
between everyone watching and no-one –
your dance just something happening.
Joy in the struggle with others,
taking responsibility for a stillness
disguised as a person.
Do not give into despair. Listen with the whole
body to the silence of objects – how different
movements refer to one another.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Scott Thurston began writing in the poetry scene situated around Gilbert Adair’s Sub-Voicive Poetry reading series and Bob Cobbing’s New River Project workshops in London in the late eighties. He gained a PhD in Linguistically Innovative Poetry and Poetics in 2001 and currently lectures in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Salford where he runs a Masters in Innovative and Experimental Creative Writing. He co-runs The Other Room reading series in Manchester, edits The Radiator, a little magazine of poetics, and co-edits The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry with Robert Sheppard. He lives in Liverpool.
Scott’s books include: Of Being Circular (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2010), Internal Rhyme (Shearsman, 2010), Momentum (Shearsman, 2008), and Hold (Shearsman, 2006).
Scott’s creative practice as a writer attempts to steer a course between an awareness of the material nature of language whilst acknowledging its capacity to communicate directly or indirectly. He works in an improvisational fashion, writing short poems which respond to experience and memory in spontaneous ways. These poems build up into sequences which become records of processes of thinking over time. Scott is fascinated by how thought and language move, and the capacity of the poem to track and trace these subtle energies.
See Scott’s pages at The Archive of the Now
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, March 27th, 2011.
