Angela Arnold lives in North Wales and is also an artist and a creative gardener. Her poems have appeared in print magazines, anthologies and online, in the UK and elsewhere. Her collection In|Between, about ‘inner landscapes’ and relationships, was published by Stairwell Books this spring.
Dual Carriageway
Flood in the air.
Loud dances on windscreens,
unmusical hammers, impatient.
Yellow ghosts wave from the verges:
thin-fingered or broad, stooped
under their last wet load of the year
like old folks, ours, not to be ignored.
Miles of hints of mist and spook
nestled among black boles,
signalling, making a point while
sprays of bright shine-like views
ravel – unravel – poignant memories
all the way up the A483
among the splash and hiss of us.
© Angela Arnold
Place of. Notime.
Brown-blotchily green, bit samey, if you look at it.
The very, the bittiest
recollection of the steep or the flat of it, the long
of it and the short mishmashed
like Scrabble tiles in the bag.
Here’s a precise photo gallery of aches:
cycling into a wild scud of clouds, ears vividly
burning, raw pain, the need
to reach…her. Her. Before.
(And the now of life whips past…if not really
that excitingly alarming.) Click-and-then-clank:
outmoded slide projector dustily whirrrrring up
disjointed-grace scenes, with a faint
smell of live heat.
Pulling the past into daisy leaf segments.
It happened.
It happened not.
But must have.
Disorderedly.
None of it
offering more than untempting blanks, by tea time. All of it
just about making room for that great softness of ‘green’
to re-emerge, maybe, ‘tomorrow’.
Though even then
not that electrifyingly fresh.
© Angela Arnold
New People
Collapsed while running: instant. – All the heartache
of two children soaked into these walls,
leaving forever hand prints on the taps, footprints
the length of the garden: pits of grief and peeled off bits
by the front door – evidence still of the crime
of headlong leaving.
The betrayal of death writ, large and small, all over
this place, with its for sale sign now removed.
And here they stand with smiles as if.
Drinks, nibbles, invites as if not.
And we nod amiably, heartsore, furious.
© Angela Arnold
Not About the Pain
Only three weeks ago, in a spasm of choked hell-
hounded depression you said it would tear your heart out
to see it shine – the blackness of it, you said. And I
understood you, inattentively, unimaginatively, to mean the
shadows.
And now you lay yourself out
like dry bread waiting for the melting
of butter: as if the sun were to soak
right into your tendered body,
something vital
gained for good…but
with such a well-oiled fuss
and such a too-tight-lipped worship face
that, honestly, I no longer
dare to understand.
© Angela Arnold