Tess Biddington & Adam Burbage
March 2009
TB
Weight of water
Mother has been drowned. We saw her face lifting for air – or so we thought. Perhaps she was instead
surrendering. Her hair was beautiful, the way it took on a slow Eastern grace. Perhaps it was the hair
that stopped us seeing the desperation in her eyes, the mouth an ohh forever and her fingers pressed white against the glass until it was too late.
Father had her coat ready pinching the shoulders so the sleeves hung hopeless and she fell into its shape. Her shoes are still paired
by the door. I do love you, she said. We held our forks ready as batons, glasses of squash quivering in the hope of Schubert – his fete of fish and streams
returning her to her body as she laid out plates before us and we, expectant as a quintet taking breath before the first chord
drops its pearls into a bow, waiting for her to say,
ah listen!
the piano
is so much more of a wind instrument
Don’t you think?
AB
Unpossessed
The river is exact. Like energy, expended only in pursuit
it cannot be contained. It has no symptoms.
Witness the futility with which we comb its elements, how we labour
to recuperate its origins. The river yearns as we yearn, it learns as we
do not. The river changes that by which it is changed, ceaselessly
testing the limits of its disclosure, refining its powers of revulsion.
Its music, rustling like static instead rehearses its own erasure,
carefully redefining what it is not. The river is unpossessed. Observe
the jealousy with which it screens its instincts, indifferent to our secrets.
TB
Severn Crossing
Do you remember when you took me to your river? Were you thinking I would love it as you do? We stood at its hem where a muddy emulsion slicked our boots. There was black weed with its petrified pods, hopeless on the rocks; and you staring at the scheming currents.
You taught me there of your alliances with opacity and the treachery of tides, how I must not question your pact with the psychopathy of water; its relentless purposeless purpose. We drove inland then, not speaking. I thought of my own river; rococo by comparison; speaking every thought, singing every tune.
Do you remember how we stood on opposite banks then and no ferry? Did you hear, through the fog, the cries of the drowning men? Did you ever walk, like me, to the end of the fractured span of the railway bridge and look over the edge?
AB
Near Didcot Power Station
evening:
………………..setting out (again) the light now drags the water into its own patterns, igniting new perspectives ……………….shuffled by the surface breeze unburdened, at the last, if only of its most recent confinements, a dozen orange cross-hairs on the shore flicker as if to spark a revival, announcing our departure …………….& disturbing my abortive gaze, the locus is pressure, how the river recovers our most vulnerable moments, ususally here, casual amongst commuters our conversation labours against a proliferation of surfaces glanced from the carriage window, the talk is of boundaries ……………………………………..allegiance has nothing to do with it loping in and out of the evening’s generous traffic, you crossing & uncrossing your legs
……………………………………..as the train shudders into a latent siding credulous amongst the lights, wary ……………………………………..of water
that by morning threatens to extinguish a city.
TB
Air water glass sky
……………………all optical media ……………………according to theory but who can say this is cloud or river or the carriage light reflected, doubly, triply, in the window, there being such complicated bartering between them at this time of day?
Who says Snell’s law applies here; light occupied variously ……………………on a novel across the aisle, ……………………a magazine adjacent, and ……………………in my hands, research about intimate partner violence and all of these existing in parallel but somehow outside, lost in diesel speed.
Light sliding from the day past notched destinations from Paddington to Exeter, people washed up on platforms, the river draining from them, certainty anchored in someone else’s science
air water glass sky
With a good mirror the transmitted or reflected angle always equals the incident angle;
nothing is transformed. It is the same below as above within as without. There is no magic. There is no river in the train if that’s what you were thinking.