HOLOGRAM

Pam Thompson

Sunk Island Publishing

 Hologram © Pam Thompson, 2008

ISBN 978-187477836-3

Sunk Island Publishing

c/o 7 Lee Ave, Heighington, Lincoln, LN4 1RD

Acknowledgments

All of the poems featured here were part of a blogging

project and some are included in a collection from
Redbeck Press, The Japan Quiz.

See http://pamthompsonpoetry.wordpress.com/ for

these and other poems with accompanying images.
HOLOGRAM

He called me over, held it up

to the light, tilted it against his mouse-mat;
then, a city the colour of Lucozade,
intricate, clear.

You could carry this around forever,

slip it into your pocket or bag:
this teeming, sprawling, beautiful illusion.
HELICES

They think they leave no trace, the women

who sip from a glass than step out
of one life to try on the next; travelling together
like wind-thieves they imagine they’re alone,
may arrive without shoes, astonished at seeing
bare feet. They trust in their houses’ amnesia.

But we have taken this from them, look,

a swab from saliva abandoned
on the glass’s rim. We’ll stretch what’s inside
like ribbons or beads, fix it on a slide
like thin glass: contemporary, stained.
It’s what’s absent that tells us the most.
We’ll decipher the gaps, give them back
husbands, fathers, sons, they thought surely lost.
GHOSTS

In the half light of the car park

behind Burger-King, underneath the fire-escape
which led to Shotokan,
at the side of sleazy arches where no woman should
ever venture, we were flickering in the dark
like sea-green ghosts,
flickering, nearly out,
like guttering candles.

There were others like us:

wavering, flame-like,
collecting children, crossing roads,
paying bills in sub post-offices
that were about to close
forever and perhaps we should have been
looking down at this from somewhere higher,
more celestial, from a cliff-top,
lighthouse-turret, or a cloud.

Yes, we were waiting for a half-life to begin

when it was over;
in a back-street
called denial;
in the suburb of not-yet.
NO WORLD

Where is grace? Each creature

has its spirit of place. For the guy in shades
on the door of Fat Cat, it’s not there, it’s a wet field,
a quad-bike, beers on a Sunday. What is grace?
You name your goddess, your god,
to release a name from the place.

She hasn’t reached home, crosses

a road in steep heels, misses the last bus, a lift,
goes back to the club. He makes a shrine, waiting,
in the wrong place, for grace: shot-glasses brimful,
six king-size Rizlas twisted into a flower.
Grace is the minutes this takes.

Waiting for goddess or god is like waiting

for grace on the breeze. Name one, say any.
Jesus Christ slips down his tongue.
His phone flashes her name which was given
with grace. He listens to the din of the place.
Re-builds the shrine in his head walking home.
Three poems based on artworks by Louise Bourgeois

THE RETICENT CHILD

the spider wasn’t evident

when she was a pale pink cloth woman
with distended belly
nor when belly/foetus/ womb and all
its sustaining baggage was left on the floor
nor because it happened
there on another floor
and the pale pink cloth woman pressed
down pressed down

pale pink dry cloth

now spillage
yes the cord the cord
how many times wrapped round
lets say just once then
and then
then on and on
she kept
kept strangling him with his only means of life

and then we forget a stage

but there’s the son man with his head down

standing over there with his head
down
like a broken flower
pink one
and look there he is like a man
curled in a pale pink cot
pale pink cloth swaddle

he is marble

makes him reticent no doubt

MEMORIAL (1)

Everyone can see them,

her old clothes
on the branches of the bronze metal
tree

her champagne-coloured blouse

her oyster silk chemise
the black-beaded evening sheath
with the low back

the spider underneath the tree is

concerned that
there will be no room
for the stockings, the pink satin brassiere
and the coat
she covered them up with

once

when she ran past the spider

into the night
MEMORIAL (2)

The spider was in a different position in the morning.

She had left it there expecting no change.
All preconceptions shattered she turned to her army
of fetishes and of the one made up of sticky red
triangles
asked if there had ever been a moment of doubt
in all that and if its replacement would only mimic
the necessary sense of loss etc.
COLD SPRING (2)

Tonight, as I do when I want truth, heart, solace,

I return to Elizabeth Bishop. She
tells me about that cold spring
when the violet was flawed on the lawn
and in just a few words
has told me everything and I could go on
stealing her words, making
a much better poem but I’ll paraphrase
and make her sense mine: the next day
was much warmer and greenish-white dogwood
infiltrated (infiltrated! sing it!) the wood
and petal was burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt.
She gets close, close-up, then we’re under
the new moon watching fireflies begin to rise,
exactly, like bubbles in champagne.
It was exactly like that. And so it was
at 6am, up to mark, pouring the first
of three strong black coffees and seeing the sun,
new, as if for the first time, high and certain.
A bird flew away from it and I cried.
THE FLY-WHISK

(after an ancient Indian painting)

She is holding off her beloved with a fly whisk

this beautiful Indian woman who wears fine armlets
and in her ear a sprig from the tree of heaven:
a delicate action, whisk like a flame or an orange
cloud.
Her half-smile of determination, we suspect,
might turn readily into a wide smile of joy when
the fly-whisk is dropped
for peacocks to scratch around it in the dust.
Meanwhile, her lover adopts a stoical half-lotus, hands
on thighs, leaning slightly forward, gathering
his amber sash as if it were a fly-whisk, or indeed,
the warm scented empty sari of his beloved.
KING OF THE SWANS

He has given up on housing-

departments, won’t stand in queues,
fill in forms. No thanks.

Come back tomorrow. He won’t bother.

Now he’s regal near water,

dispenses crusts, calls down swans,
seagulls also.

They gust like litter, unruly,

landing on benches; on the skin of the canal.

They have slowed their wing-beats a fraction:

their special way of arriving;
their slow glide of greeting.
THE GREEN VIOLINIST

(after a painting by Marc Chagall)

Tap-dances on our roofs

sounding unlike rain
and minds his own in his variegated
purple umbrella coat,
and his un-matching shoes.

He is one of the dispossessed

but as we go about our daily
tasks, flying and sweeping,
fetching the lambs in,
we are not mindful of that.

We don’t part with loose change today

either. Anyone can fiddle.
It takes skill, however to balance
a ladder in bare branches;
to measure the width of a breeze.
WHATEVER COMES TO HAND

Coming back from another country,

leaving it a night for things
to settle I notice how this one, too,
is in colour, rinsed: leaves, sky, bricks,
light. Knowing where I have to go, it’s shades
of Blake and the prison-
door, the fluttering mind, clipped
and folded, stapled even; copied.
There’s only so far
you can go without kicking
out maybe by drawing
hieroglyphs on your wrist, pulling down
a screen, a tableau vivant, they can’t
see it, it’s your vision -
when they look into them your
eyes are attentive,
compliant. At this stage of the day,
strong colours are imperceptibly fading,
you’ll notice,
though, breathe, travel, remember
THE UNRECALLABLE

(after Roddy Lumsden)

Since you ask, this was how I stayed awake.

I imagined a stand of trees
growing tall, white trunks
curling like ribbons
up to the polished shell of our sky.

Better than that, I was a door

in the sand opening into pipeworks of earth.
Did I mention that when shadows
of fish darted past, I held on,
till they slipped through my fingers?

But mostly I thought of those two:

a couple of crofts losing heat
in a darkening evening. How one
faced out to the lough, and the other,
the town, over acres of fields.

They must, as we must, have the sting

of sleet; a mad experiment
on the roofs, pinging rockpools,
cattle; biting the faces of chancers
on the high road from the pub.

I thought of those two; then ribbons

of fish brushing my hands; flowers gaining heat;
a light in a window, as eloquent
as Venus. The witchery of sleet. Rain
curled up in the polished shell of sleep.
PHOSPHORESCENCE

My recurring dreams of water:

trapped on land eaten by sea,
or in a cave at high tide;
looking down at a woman’s body
in clear green water near a pier.

Dreams of water, or dreams of fire,

but not for ages until the other night
when a flame leapt
from the cooker, bounced onto me,
then three or four of my friends,
each of us then, on fire, in it.
There was no smell of burning,
no smoke and no-one screamed.

This dream fire’s cool, possesses,

in fact, the properties of water.
But now I want a proper water dream;
not the sort where I nearly drown;
one where I’m swimming
in a dark, warm sea, and emerge,
dripping with phosphorescence.
MENHIR

Spring now. Clock change.

The air: lemony, powdery;

the pulse quickening.
A day to make offerings,
not to a god, but to a spirit,
benign, strokeable.

Find, then, a fitting tall stone:

a menhir, in an alignment.
There will be fissures:
cracks down which you can trickle loose change.

This is like feeding a spirit in a fountain;

in a waterfall in a glen.

It is expected.
You will find it quite by chance.
You will be lucky ever after.
ASSEMBLAGE

(after ‘Suzy’s Sun’ by Joseph Cornell)

And another thing I didn’t say

that the downward spikes of the sun’s boxed rays
will usually temporarily replace
the climate of an average human being’s face
so that if your arrival is precise
and timely, your aspect fair, and you’ve surmised
the first few rules of pitch
and roll, you’ll navigate an empty patch
of land, plant two yellow pennants, launch
a flare that dies in painted cirrus, inch
towards a glass that’s clean, a shell
that’s lodged in air. Next time I’ll tell
you more about the bench; the wooden ball.
This much is truth for now. That’s all.
Current Sunk Island Titles

Let's Build A City, Michael Blackburn

Eskeleth And Apples, Michael Blackburn
Trees On Bear Road, Brendan Cleary
Intermittent Faults, David Lightfoot
L by Dave Reeves
Hologram, Pam Thompson

All at £3.50 each, inclusive of postage.

Of previous titles by Pam Thompson:

“Pam Thompson has a voice that should echo through

our minds and should, through her skill, remind us
‘who we were. It is a voice I look forward to hearing
again and again.” John Cartmel-Crossley

“Pam Thompson’s world is a compelling, understated,

often sad, slightly surreal modern Britain…” Sue
Butler

“Pam's poems are as precise as they are beautiful, she

uses language deftly to make emotional landscapes real
and affecting.” Alison Dunne

“Pam Thompson balances a remarkable combination of

savvy urban observations with sensuous lyricism, in a
voice that keeps you intrigued, moved and enthralled
with every line.” Robert Hamberger

“Pam Thompson's poetry is sensitive and observant,

without over-reaching or too much artifice…She has
that ability to say telling things, in her own and other
voices, with authority, but great calm. I admire her as
a writer, but I love reading her poems.” Kerry
Featherstone

ISBN 978-187477836-3
£3.50