3:AM Magazine

By Antony Dunn.

Guide

It’s a short few steps from the hotel
through the hutong to the cricket-house

Stop staring
                  it’s just the old guy’s home
and though it’s all done up like New Year
with homespun strings of wicker baubles
it’s a hole and no doubt
                                    given wings
he’d airlift himself up out of it
heading west along the flyover
that dots and dashes for miles
                                            and stops
mid-air somewhere there’s nothing to be
above but dust
                      which may or may not
be the place where desert and suburbs
will wreck themselves against each other
when the time comes

                                You should reel him off
one of your small notes
                                    they’re only good
for bookmarks back home
                                      and drive out there
yourself and peel your green cricket out
from its globe and set it off through straw
and stubble and find out for yourself
what it thinks it’s got to sing about

       
Cricket

Evening after evening the sun
draped its red folds over the dust-fields
and the sickle moon hung idly up

and the small lights that came out were fires
for melting hoes to cymbals and gongs
to shock the sparrows from crops to traps

and the crickets and the locusts
occupied the emptied air above
the drop and scatter and heap of birds

and the farms rang with the dry whet
of limb on limb and the hunger of
all that wore our bones outside our skin

       
Xi Chuan

Translate this –
                        Once I wanted to write
only about the bottle
                              then I
wanted to write about the bottle
and its shadow
                      and now I want to
write only about the shadow –
                                            and
now do you understand

       
Guide

Now the heat has brought the June-bugs out

Anything we cannot name will go
by that name
                    the caterpillars
                                          say
tracking the road and the cockroaches
scuttering pavements or tattering
their shells against the mausoleum
their great leap forward against the wall
and off and underfoot
                                and the Square
is so alive with them
                              look what you
can crush just by falling to your knees.
       

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Antony Dunn was born in London in 1973. He won the Newdigate Prize in 1995 and received a Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award in 2000. He has published three collections of poems, Pilots and Navigators (Oxford Poets 1998), Flying Fish (Carcanet OxfordPoets 2002) and Bugs, which will be published by Carcanet Oxford Poets on 30 September 2009.

His writing for theatre and film has included Goose Chase and Shepherds’ Delight (both for Riding Lights Theatre Company), Timewarp 2000 (Barbican, York) and a screen adaption of Albert Camus’ stageplay, Cross Purpose (First Man Productions). In 2006 he contributed lyrics to Mark Ravenhill’s pantomime, Dick Whittington and His Cat (Barbican, London).

Antony is Head of Communications at Yorkshire Dance, and an Artistic Associate of Useful Donkey Theatre Company. He was Poet in Residence at the University of York for 2006.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, August 30th, 2009.