A.C. Thomas

It took a bus and a train to get to you, wedding, but we got there, in our minds, tumbling down Northumberland inclines words not seeming enough, just vibrations.
The converted barn, white lights set deep into beams and holding the view, stood proud at the bottom of the track where you removed your shoes and held my hand, the vows having already taken place, in both heads and hearts.
Following bridal laughter,
I pulled names from hats, and was tenderly introduced to drinks and people and histories bound in ribbon, handshakes and wine.
Smoking upon the stone steps, a joke rose into the pastels of the sky and fell among dark green encampments of pine, turns of land like conversations.
Cold sent us back inside, for another moment, then music spilled into the countryside, walls reverberating with chorus and harmony and a particular, urgent sense of revelry appeared soon accompanied by widening circles, directions of playful social enquiry, until the inhibitions were dropped, sexually, like the strap of a champagne flute dress.
Our hot mouths drew closer, and strangers melted into acquaintance and coincidence, escapades onto the balcony returned with handfuls of tobacco and more kisses for you and I swore the lights began to dim as I held you closer than reason suggested, and heard voices swelling with pride and surety, night now upon us, holding the hair from your eyes.
*
At the end, the evening’s end, I found you dear, waiting at the top of the track, shoes off and hands full of splinters.
I’ve been waiting for you for ages, you said, a little drunk.
Me too, I said silently and happily, me too.

Having myself a brief morning cigarette before a fall into the back of a camo-green Citroen camper, the slight frost upon the incline to the coast, the sound of laughter travelling further in the cold, have a cigarette
Pausing for hours at Druridge Bay, we conversationalised, had a conversation still and wintry, a stretch of fossils and word we have been a conversation, ground bricks and smoothed glass, black traces just beneath the surface, only exposed by the slow drag of a foot.
In exchanging words, pastel-grass whips at the air, clutches of papercut foliage and tears of gorse gather in the recesses upon the peaks. Strips of dune
Firstly fall away onto the beach and then rise up out of turns and complications, syntax and error.
Behind the sentences, just out of earshot, two lakes kidney-shaped, quarries dug and erased, mimicking the inflection of the coast: above, fluid clouds of starlings drifting and ebbing, indescribable above the water’s surface.
As our voices rose and rose and fell like undulations, pebbled and laden with finds, the crook of burnt seawood held between us,
We took turns just sitting awhile, tones tumbling down a hill flattened at the transition, the cropped waves pouring in at perpendiculars, edging towards our shoes, towards our quietening, drowning out the noise.

the weather forecast said that today’s rain moving in from the west will initially contain a kind of silence, a speech empty of words, the perfect nothingness that the narrator endless tries to present in literature, within the covers of books. later this afternoon, constant reappraisals will occur alongside literature’s endless self-investigation and removal, with further removal and change because silence is the sound of existence is the nothingness of potentially creative negation. the rain is set to clear overnight but will resume again tomorrow, heavier, like a millstone around our necks that weighs us down into being, into a reminder of the very impossibility of emerging from existence; the reminder that death is the impossibility of dying, and that the rain continues, always.
the walk took one minute laid it bare like the surgeon’s task. the hill ran away from us, down itself, a recomposition of anger. upon that peak the night broke into two a spectrum of indifference frayed white at the edges. with vertebrae click we set off into grey sketchbook landscapes and cut-out towns afraid of the horizon and its protest but full of rain, we grew infused, melting with pavements and great slats of heaven, our words dissolving into vats of weather like meaning in song.

i)
Only a little light escapes from us
Or just enough.
Earlier, you listened to the chatter of bathwater and distractedly read the heavy pages of an old Russian classic, half-tempted to drown it and start something afresh, but too fearful of not finishing to carry it out.
The sandpaper you use as a bookmark suffers in the humidity, drooping at the book's side, a wilting indicator of progress.
This is where you are.
The lull of the afternoon, even a dismissive hand gesture is a trial.
The languor seeps into the floorboards and teabags, lies inside sandwiches and it is the white between newstype.
Doubts settle like dust. ii)
At the edge of a region where light turns
Round us to a horizon of no events.
I love you.
The three words we hide, the whispered encounter, the blissful retraction we find inside the scattered black and whites of books.
We only know each other in worlds that we ourselves have created.
We read each other in a single poem, reading the same verse from the same white book, reading what we have read before, over and over. iii)
Here there are sunflowers,
A world only just refusing to vanish.
Walking towards your house in spring’s frayed light, never quite encompassing your negativity. Guessing at the situation, the removal of another, a blissful retraction, dusty words piled upon the bookshelves.
Inside you sit in warm soapy water holding something deep within yourself, feeling it press with tiny hands, an inside out, the opposite of lust. Sitting perfectly still you focus, moving towards honesty and the stalls we set, of mother and baby, of fathers. I draw closer.
Taking influences while you take bathe, I continue to stride, irrelevating, a row of terraces pitching out to the east and to the sea,

the feint shivers of a childhood, to rockpools and leavings, to love again but of a different kind. iv)
We remember our future
Just as it happens now.
You learnt of the follies of babies from your mother, who knew birth in two ways; the baby angry to be alive, screaming with gorgeous ponds for eyes, and the baby dead.
Your mother never gave you away to anything once you were born, especially not to nature. v)
Bowed time, out of the East window.
Moss floated in oil.
Only a little light or not enough.
My lateness makes you nervous. When you give to someone, you unavoidably give uncertainty. Someway from your house, unable to maintain a time, I hurry into the fading light.
Bouquets lie in the windows, you are dry now and entirely naked as spring day’s premature end falls into the yard, concrete seen through the window. your fingers held rigid upon the windowsill, whitening at the joints.
You turn, hand upon stomach, and reach high to the bookshelf beside the window, reaching straight for the white book because a poem should mean less than you want it to, but sometimes it means more.
*
[All italicised parts adapted from Messages from Cygnus by Paul Mills ,
(Ambit 120; 1990)]

Imagine an audio cassette tape.
Recorded upon the tape are confessions you never made, but should have done. After this are promises you made just to break. Next comes a list of all the people you trusted and then hated. Finally, the tape finishes with that secret, the one that you told to that single individual on that night beneath wretched stars and under a rising blanket of humid air and pollen.
You decide this tape is a bad idea. Its presence, or rather your knowledge of its presence, is starting to affect your health, you cannot sleep. You see your friends with decreasing frequency and enthusiasm, you spend too much money on too little. In a bid for lover’s empathy, you are closing doors. Your relationships can be divided in two. Your happiness depends on company.
You decide to destroy the tape. It is a matter of fidelity.
You unravel the tape from its spindle and great reams of shiny black tape pool around your feet as you frantically reach for every last inch of the offending material, purging the plastic case, cracking it in your endeavours to reduce and nullify.
You take scissors, and begin to cut loops of tape, large healthy
‘o’s. The tape lies in layers of concentricity, the inside of a tree trunk, but gradually you are wearing it down, diminishing it.
The tape cannot be played now, repairing its chronology is an impossibility. There are only the memories now, the remembrance of what has been said. The actions fade faster than the words.
And now you open the window and look down into the street where everyone is too busy to notice a man perched upon a broad white sill clutching at segmented fibres of a past life.
You drop the sections of tape into the wind where they flutter before being hauled upwards and disseminated across the neighbourhood with no chance of retrieval, the tape has been altered and eliminated.
Now, two weeks later, during walks around the suburb in the haze of an early spring afternoon with a weak pallid sun tenderly resting above the clouds, you begin to notice slivers of the tape in bushes, entwined in hedgerows and lining gutters. It becomes impossible to look anywhere without seeing a length of the tape, mute and stolen away by thermals. It begins to become caught in your shoelaces when you pause at street corners, and the tape binds together your ankles when walking through long grass, it streams out from your pockets, it trails out across the sky and into the trees. The birds have begun to build their nests from it.

Her fostered, rising back lay beneath anticipating duvet covers. that hopeful diluted communication interrupted by coarse me, touching her inside.
The loving, awkward situation came into view.