Keir Batchelor 

Five Poems

Translations

Rosa, Lavandula, Juniperus,

you tell me, makes up my Gran’s perfume,

and the Latin lessons you had as a boy 

have gone long since unstudied 

and the few words that remain are lost

as grains within their grain store. 

Ad Maiora, you say, as I’m playing

with your watch. You’ll have one too some day

with hands of its own, cut off 

by the request of my gran to zip up

the back of her dress,

which you do without question.

She’s hanging clothes over the shower rail

in a hurry; there’s a boy sat on a pail 

on the cover of the book you hand me.

I’m left with that and the TV

and a plate in the microwave 

and I run to the window and wave

to the taxi; the one night a week

you go into Glasgow City Centre to eat.

Rosa, Lavandula, Juniperus –

it still hangs in the room above us,

myself, and the boy on the bucket.

Ad aiora, avus.

Meeting Dad

There’s thirty years between you and I.

Your room is full of objects and language.

Your politics are implosive

And yet you speak so matter of fact.

Lesson: words which begin and end alike

are perceived to be related, that is

etymologically at least.

Often, they have no connection at all.

It’s a paradigm to associate 

kin together, but we are similar

as words, as absent is to permanent.

The Butterfly and Pig (Nee The Corona)

You said you didn’t mind

us kissing in the rain.

We sat back and lapped up

The Scottish karaoke.

The Saltire draped across

the back of the two-foot stage.

Four boys’ arm in arm,

steaming as the kettle,

front and centre’s What's'isname

that took you

to prom when you were seventeen,

a dreadful gossip.

The small talk you try

and un-convincingly make.

We’re here, the pub ten minutes

up the road from your mum’s place,

fifteen minutes from mine.

They disappear

to the one club around the corner,

the only club

in this part of town

since we were sixteen.

It’s just you and I

while it’s pissing rain

and filling up the ponds

in Queen’s Park. We’re standing

at your door and after an hour

when I said I have to go, for the fourth time,

you lose your grip on me and let me wander

five minutes up the road

It was Wonderful

The windows cracked,

a drill playing,

you came to.

The first cold morning

in months. Bedsheets curled,

covers ruffled, unfolded and detached

from the mattress, the lines

on my face covered

by the tacky aeroplane eye mask.

Sharing the collective headache,

who’s brave enough to brave

the frontier of the kitchen’s cold tiles

on toes, hopping, foot to foot, waiting

for the sonorous grumble

to turn into a scream.

Back in the room, the bed’s

become the sea

in a storm. The torrents

and waves of sheets collide

with the pants and socks and

underwear. You’re

sat up in the sea

with your arms around your knees,

looking out the window, listening

to the drill, fiddling with the mask.

I Want the One I Can’t Have

After you’d taken hold 

of the speakers, we trawled through Joni’s back 

catalogue. It wasn’t ‘till the glint of the clock face 

alerted me to the time: it was pushing one 

and even if we left now, it’d be half-past 

before we got there and the club may well be full.

You asked if the poem I was writing would ever go full 

circle like Kekulé’s snake and take hold 

of its own tail as our taxi drove past 

the Kelvingrove Museum. In the back

we must have sounded like lunatics asking one

another questions like that, half drunk and red in the face.

In the intestinal queue we had to face 

up to the fact we wouldn’t get in, but under the full 

light of the moon I was prepossessed by you, and the cold one 

you’d stowed in your deep pockets was enough to hold

us upright in our inebriation so we didn’t have to back

-pedal by ordering doubles when we did finally get past

the bouncer. And when we finally slithered past 

the big man I knew there wasn’t any night I couldn’t face

up to so long as you were there to have my back. 

You’d twist round my side and must have known full 

well how much I loved you. You took hold of my hand 

and we danced to I Want the One

I Can’t Have, One Way or Another, The One

I Love. I could be pulled out of the past

at any moment, torn from the hold

this memory has over me, left to face 

the reality that it wasn’t but three full 

months after this that I was pleading with you to take me back.

You looked sickened as I knocked another back. 

You said through gritted teeth you’d met someone 

at your Quaker meeting and I said you were full 

of shit. You left with the sentiment that you were past 

caring what became of me, a little smile on your face, 

and all the cards two people once in love could hold. 

Hold back the tears. Hold the ghost of my past 

at bay. I want the one I can’t have. It’s all over my face!

Sung with the volume at full, the longest note I ever had to hold.