ISSUE 7
Last Updated: 15 April 2005

Poems from REAL
Stephen Ratcliffe

11.21
Upper right corner of the blue grey plane
intersecting lower left of the green one,
various darker greens and grey in the distance
through which sound of birds arrives.  Ex-wife
leaving a mixing bowl on the man's front porch
together with a love poem by Shelley, to which
he replies with unequivocal silence.  The short-
haried woman lying in the candlelit tub after
the water drains out, shadow of small round
breast on the porcelain wall.  Man in green
sweatshirt hold ing up a grey and white gull
whose body smells like wet wool, Kandinsky's
thought of the period between silence and sound.
Appearance of enormous grey and white pelican's
shape gliding across the glare of the outgoing
channel's current, grey and white seal's head
popping up on the inside.
 
 
11.22
Black and white motion of small bird's wings
flapping into sunlit green branches of cypress
tree to the left of the green glass door, pair
of wet orange red apples on the table.  The man
in the red jacket leaving a note on the silver-
haired man's Woody parked on the cliff, lines
approaching across blue-green plane below it.
Four televisions on in mother's house first
thing in the morning, gossip columnist's report
of Liz Taylor asking Richard Burton "Do you ever
give yourself the creeps Love?" Shapes of small
black birds lined on telephone wire above a stop
light, the short-haired girl's phone cutting out
when she says "I've given up my place to live."
Grey-white of clouds across lines of ridge
slanting to the left, random pattern of rain
drops falling onto grey green surface of water.
 
 
11.23
Vertical upstairs window opening onto upturned
crescent of the waning moon holding a quotation
of the old moon in its arms, angle of eucalyptus
grove in the pre-dawn dark below it.  The plane
on left more filled with white than one beside
it, whose vertical brown swatch appears to be
something left over from short-haired girl's
previous thought.  Man in the red jacket's
sister in the kitchen busier than ever,
stepmother on the phone having seen the green
flash.  Man walking down the curve in the road
saying the grey car can pass on the left, two
women next to flashing lights of stalled car
waiting in the dark.  Upper edges of a grey
white cloud piling up above the invisible
horizontal top of the ridge, swell line
approaching on the outside.