| FRANK O' HARA 
ON
YOUR NERVE
DAVID
KINLOCH
Poet, editor, Senior Lecturer in French
Studies at the University of Strathclyde, and lecturer in
French at Glasgow University. His books include Dustie-Fute
(Vennel Press, 92) and Paris-Forfar (Polygon, 94).
He edited the influential magazine Verse with
Robert Crawford; then Southfields with Richard
Price and Raymond Friel. David made a short film of one
of his poems, Bed, for the Glasgow Film and
Video Workshop, and contributed a reading from On
Your Nerve to the Radio Free East Shields
webcast. His most recent volume is Tour D'Ecosse
(Carcanet, 2001)
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Casting a
Line
'Tu souleveras le rideau
Et maintenant voila que s'ouvre la fenetre'
Wrote the poet Guillaume Apollinaire
In the world's first 'poeme conversation'
'You will lift up the curtain
And now here is the window opening'
Which I did and it does
Amid blue potato-printed walls
Of Columba's Hotel, Loch Fyne
'Tu souleveras le rideau' On fat Guillaume himself
Casting a mean line from the century's
Turn beneath the barking Tarbert
Gulls O Albert Vladimir Apollinaris de
Kostrowitsky 'Paris Vancouver Hyeres
Maintenon New York et les Antilles'
Shiver in circles where your bait schlocks
In and a tour eiffel of sea-weed
Corrugates beneath your bum!
Trout browse his boat like bouquinistes
And as his body signs a whirligig
Of cedar, oak-wood, russet, moonlight
Oars nailed to the peely-wally
Canvas of his face he hooks
The cubist eye-browed fish
And tenderly throws them
Back.
'Tu souleveras le rideau'
And he is not was not here
But might have been:
A single gent in an en-
Suite with Matisse-like
Windows open to the sunlight:
It passed for two short decades
Over his square head,
Passed over and always
Jogged a mild 'declic'
That left him groping
In his memory of furnished rooms --
Koblenz Berlin Stockholm --
For shadows of perfume,
The 'frollement' of Annie's hair.
Just movement really,
Sun shines recalling
An unceasing European shuffle,
The shape of all his journeys
Not their content.
I have a memory he would like
From the same blue room
He might have lodged in:
When from my bed
I turn my head towards
The estuary of little islands
In the loch, the rippling
Water's magnified by bevels
In the skinny window pane.
Cal Mac wobbles,
Bulging through bubbles in the glass:
Unsteady wake, awake
In the passing waves
Nozing for a line
Through my hour-glass pane.
I look again and this time
The window's inverted telescope
Shows me hillocks on the mull
Across the firth are fauve
With yellow gorse and broom
'Du rouge au vert tout le jaune se meurt'
And down on Fire Island Beach
Beneath the same sun Guillaume's
Lobbed across the kyle Frank wavers
In the sand too full of bourbon
To entirely catch its words:
Pollock, Patsy, Kline and Motherwell,
Madrid, Paris, Oscar Salvador and
Warren, marks among the falling
Grains -- sun dew -- names
In poems Apollinaire made possible
And musical O Frank the broken
Lines of barbecue sticks trace
Stories through the cottages of dunes
Until a buggy's headlights make a bee-
Line for you just as shrapnel did
For Guillaume.
'La fenetre s'ouvre comme une orange'
I peel back the curtains
To the window bubbles
Streaming their oysterish
Juice 'Soleil cou coupe'
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