The Literary Review
Approximations
Man am I, a woman,
both fellow and mate,
relative desister
from Truth.
Apes, aren’t we? on the shore,
twenty digits and
one poor collective word
for sand.
Wrapped up in a wristwatch
against exagger-
ated eternity –
“My time,”
I simplify. Dust all
becomes, atomised;
ground stuffs that will re-as-
semble
truth plural. Did I say
dead? I father lies
in my womanly way
and live.
- Rosemary Drescher
Night Autobahn
Sleek on a diet of looming shadows,
the dark memories of daytime panoramas,
the nightway trawls
entrailing the land
in lengths of shrieking two-way peristalsis
red
by side
with onrushing eyes white
I sit, hurtling
intestined in a slipstream
screenscape
Succulent human
I am
Indigestible
- Rosemary Drescher
Snail
A common or garden, ground coloured snail made its home on my gleaming white bathroom tiles. It parked in the neighbourhood of the shower head, three rows down from the window ledge, leaving a purposeful but jagged trail down the patterned pane which showed up in the steam from my bath. That tile was the snail’s destination. With forefinger and thumb I took hold of the snail’s shell and cast it, treading on air, out of the window. Later, when I left the house and passed the bathroom on the outside, I saw the snail with its shell like a ship in sail on the dirt sea, heading for that tile again.
- Rosemary Drescher
Junction
The moons rise green
and spanning this late night
What follows is tidal: rev and flow,
journey, shift and errand
towards many small shores.
The settings of our ruling planets predict red.
Invisible will pulls apart the traffic
for the passing of the free
mastering the wheel
and steered by the changing light.
Our father is an engineer.
- Rosemary Drescher
The middens
Here they will have sat and opened
the fruit of the sea – fruit being a land word,
sweet and salt – the middens
growing about them, their young
and the young of their young, shells
once manufactured in the hearts
of molluscs, chucked.
So many places they’ve made unloved
but with a beauty to the power of usefulness,
making now their own shells – shell
being a word with both pearls and emptiness –
with machines they’ve made in the minds of
other machines that somewhere
are programmed by hand.
They outstrip in hunger the rest of earth,
that jealous top soil teeming with rivals
covering concrete in the night,
lifting tarmac on the shoulders of saplings.
Their roundabouts spin riders
encased in vehicles off on all routes
but where we come from.
- Rosemary Drescher
Little sycamores
Little sycamores break free:
They have choppered down the wind without order
to set root in the soils of this terrace, in all innocence,
and populate my unshifting patio plates.
Let them know that I decide in this garden.
I pluck a forest out of the beds with one fist.
The steps from the house take me up and down
a history of the seas cemented.
Now I sit down on a step to rest
my feet on the crazy paving, my back
against the wooden window, and catch
my fingers’ work under the rule of crumble:
paint, posts, and flagstones shifting.
While an old sycamore pod
cracks open a fresh green eye,
right beside my foot, and winks at me
- Rosemary Drescher