by Tom Pow

The Reading
          Granada, Nicaragua
i.m. Derek Walcott

The old master swivels his prize–
winning head round the audience
with the authority of an owl.

Some avert his gaze,
while others occupy the aisles,
capturing him on their phones.

He introduces a poem
about the father he never knew;
at its core what a woman

had once written to him,
a full twenty eight years
after his father’s death. The poem

will describe the old woman,
her skin paper thin, forming
her letters as, in her last days,

she carries out this office
of kindness. Walcott tells us —
a lion’s pride in this

as in everything he does —
that the old woman used four
adjectives to describe his father:

that he was dutiful, honest,
faithful and useful. Walcott gives
each word its proper weight —

lays them before us like well–
worn tools. ‘But she was not
an educated woman and she spoke

about my father in the present
tense: he is dutiful, he is honest,
he is faithful, he is useful.’

It was this simple tense change,
Walcott says, that altered
memories of his father forever

and brought tears to his eyes.
I have looked for the poem
but never found it and I wonder

whether its lattices of language
could match the memory I keep
of a great poet talking simply

of what he held close to his heart.

by Tom Pow

One deer, then another,
flushed out by my presence,
before I can even spot

what they were doing
before me, cross half a field
in four bounds and take

a fence as tall as myself —
the second a split moment
after the first; a mirror

letting me catch how
the forelegs tuck up
to their chests and the back legs

extend as power lends
itself to flight, if flight
can be a brief hanging

in air of elegance
and purpose. For some time
before the deer, I’d felt —

in the warmth of spring,
in the gentle climb
between fields, a space

opening up in me —
only that, nothing more,
not even whether it might be

a window or a door.
Something that suggested
a paying of attention;

a seeing what the tide
might bring in — at the top
of the glen, two kestrels

drawing wheels in the blue;
the water I carry, cold yet,
bearing a faint trace of home.

by Stewart Conn

I cannot contemplate your taking ill, say,
any more than I can the prospect of no
dawn, no morning patter of fine rain

against the pane, no rich skies at sundown.
As for your absence, no remote
comparison, even when imagining

those hundreds of little auks driven
from their place on the ice–pack, their
twittering trills silenced as they are caught

in long–handled nets and crammed
into airtight seal–skins then left
fermenting for months, before being eaten.

by Stewart Conn

Today’s workshop was on the arc of the poem,
its variance in accord with structure and length.

Compare for instance the hundred metres hurdles
of the sonnet to the epic’s marathon run.    

But rather than tilt at these I find I am channelling
my energies into listening for the starting–gun,

then head–down, and in as many heart–beats
as it takes, concentrating on the arc from me to you.