Spacecraft

John McCullough

• Publisher: Penned In The Margins
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781908058553
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Margins, edges and coastlines abound in John McCullough's tender, humorous explorations of contemporary life and love.
Encompassing everything from lichen to lava lamps, and from the etymology of words to Brighton's gay scene, & Spacecraft is a humane and spellbinding collection from the winner of the 2012 Polari First Book Prize. Spacecraft & navigates the white space of the page and the distance between people.

III

THE SPACE AGE

Nullibiety

n. The state of being nowhere

SAMUEL JOHNSON, DICTIONARY

Stride in any direction long enough and you’ll get here

( ) where space springs an ambush

the landscape shuffles repeats. There is often a sign

for Leo’s Burgers railings toppling backwards

a copse dissolving into motorway though really

not even the sun knows where it’s wandered today.

Damn clouds. And the fields slamming into view

one after another the colour of cardboard

and thirst the years it would take to find a body

as you tread on split grass teasel flints prisoned in chalk

a river of eyes drifting inside themselves. All the same

this isn’t entirely true. There’s something homely for you

who never could stand still who leave yourself ajar.

Take a sniff the air’s breeding concepts that are nearly

old friends blurred citizens of your realm perhaps.

The Hole-Digging Contest

Air was sweetened by the crunch of spades

crafting entries: the Goths’ pentagram

trench, vast paw-prints, impact craters,

the chasm for a lost jigsaw piece.

They lay unsullied for a week

with their earthy silence,

populated by absent crowds.

They knew a hundred ways

of being empty, gathered broken stories,

non-meetings, streets never built.

They were their own graves.

Queens Road Books

i.m. Noel Brookes, 1942-2007

He might have shot up from an Arnold Bennett,

one used as a doorstop. A dapper, six-foot

statue with a whiff of cheap fags and the infinite,

his domain a city of book skyscrapers and rubbish

piles, maimed shelves. Extracting finds required panache,

a dance of slide and balance to prevent the onrush.

Beneath wreckage, Delia nuzzled Jung Chang.

Heaney lounged beside A Practical Man’s Things

to Make and Do, the smells of previous owners skulking

with soup spots, French blazonry, the odd hair.

Week on undisturbed week, I forged through The Empire

of Dust, shelved in Art. “Beggar’s velvet” circles each star,

falls with each drop of a thunderstorm . . . The tiniest

motes can enter pores in human skin. I read that last

part to a lover. I can’t remember his name, just his disinterest

in events outside now. He grinned and kissed my neck

then went to ground in Modern Fiction. I can’t bring back

the fling’s start or finish, only that hour of hide and seek.

Mr Brookes had no problem locating any volume.

The marble jaw lowered in oracular time

before a brisk Memoir. Top shelf, near the fire alarm.

He kept another shop inside his brain, each purchase

and subsidence mapped in neural space,

his not-quite-chaos. (Rhys. My lover’s name was Rhys.)

Then overnight he disappeared, abandoned

all his books. In the landlord’s sale, beside the till I found

Footnotes On Bibliomania, tobacco-stained.

A proud but friendly hardback, published recently,

already ancient. I stroked its spine, replaced it gently.

I couldn’t confine it to an alphabetical study.

Stock gone, the bare shop closed, unable to survive

without its secret twin. It carries on as shelves

inside my head. Whenever a memory sinks, turns fugitive —

a flower’s name, school hymns, an old friend’s face —

I wake myself in that small city, running fingers across

its skylines and columns, the tender spines of days.

2323__p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by John Mccullough
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• I: FLYING MACHINES
• II: NAVIGATING A SPACE
• III: THE SPACE AGE
• IV: LIVING SPACE
• Notes