Bearings

Isobel Dixon

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781911027133
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In her fourth collection Isobel Dixon takes readers on a journey to far-flung and sometimes dark places in poems that are vivid forays of discovery and resistance, arrival and loss. Bearings sings of love too, and pays homage to lost friends and poets – the voices of John Berryman, Michael Donaghy, Robert Louis Stevenson and others echo here. And there is respite for the weary traveller – jazz in the shadows, an exuberant play of words between the fire and tremors.

As Dixon explores form and subject, conflict and the self, she keeps a weather eye out for telling detail, with a sharp sense of the threat that these journeys, our wars and stories, and our very existence pose to the planet.

DARK MATTERS

Reading Cosmology on the Cherry Hinton
Bus in Spring

Pinkshift, whiteshift.

The Big Bud,

the Magnolia Way.

These trees are island galaxies.

Spring has come late this year,

like what I’ve learned.

And how to balance this burgeoning,

the oscillating green,

with the dark behind, before.

Our imprecision, what we cannot grasp,

or weigh.

The blackbird doesn’t care

for measurement:

a tug, a gulp, a yellow blink.

A wormhole with no worm,

a punctuated lawn.

Homing

Sent far afield, where they cannot spoil

the clarity of the experiment,

the pigeons fly home from Whippany,

back home to the horn listening in to the hiss:

electrons rattling, the echoing universe.

They know their way, they have the beak for it,

while we flounder in the strip-lit shopping malls,

the grey parkades. Someone’s lost

because her mind’s on deeper matters

than the change for the machine –

she’s almost cracked The Great Equation;

while my mind’s on metaphors, and tea.

Cold load’s the laundry left all morning in the drum

and saving the appearances is what I do

each morning with a touch of base and gloss.

Humdrum. Ho-hum. We know our impreciseness,

judge our loss, and carry on. And carry on.

Materiality

makeshiftshipshapedeepspace

early scary dreams

roughsmoothblackwhite

shapeshiftswellshrink

mineshaft

brainshift

silken silent scream

Dark Matter

does the dark matter

O, the dark mutters

Dark Mother

a darker moth

the darkling mote –

me-grained

megrimmed

a mute has-been

Learning

I want to touch the screen

of death between us –

a tap of QWERTYMorse

telepathy

and tell you

in some mirror universe’s fireside

chair

of what I’m reading now

the missing-matter mystery

dunkle Materie

I want to see your eyebrows knit

that cogitating pause

and hear your ‘That’s interesting, because…’

The enlivening flow of thoughts

you’ve stored

as if somehow

just for this moment

and my eager listening ears.

Presentiment

The shadow on the lawn –

out of the corner of your eye,

see it grow.

Feel the evening cool advance,

the slow summoning of dew.

Deep in the throat of the dark,

the growl,

the low vibrato cogwork of your fear,

ratcheting up. Wound-up,

wounded, wounding –

shrink back from the spirit’s dusk.

The child, crossing the grass

in sunlight,

passes the shadow-bar.

The twilight girl carries its ashen cross.

Why?

Because I say so.

The world isn’t fair.

Do as I say, not as I do.

Handsome is as handsome does.

Manners maketh the man.

Beggars can’t be choosers.

If wishes were horses,

beggars would ride.

The poor will always be with us.

God in His wisdom knows.

Lambda (at present unknown).

Lambda, at present unknown.

Economy Cosmology

‘Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to

move.’ – John Archibald Wheeler

What tells the jasmine’s starry carpet

how to spread and spill,

a fragrant wave, over Departures and Arrivals

at Aeroporto Galileo Galilei,

a sweet profusion greeting us

before the cosh of Ryanair’s cut-price blues

and Stansted’s colder steel and glass.

You and your spheres, Eudoxus,

consider this, the oscillating universe.

Consider us, consider us.

Galileo Galilei, Sidereus Nuncius,

starry messengers, O Copernicus.

In all this flurry, fuss and flux,

I pause and rest my temple

on the toughened porthole glass,

think of motion, heavens, maths.

The pulsing stars, the ticking

Wall Street screens,

my high perspective

on a world I cannot grasp.

In Which We Scat, Tra-La, the Last Vibrato Of A Single String

We walk through the hum of the summer

young on the Spanish Steps, seemingly

unscathed, on our way to another night

of all that jazz. The rose sellers grow

darker by the day and the roses more –

unreal. Upstairs, the microphone’s ...

Table of contents

• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Finsong
• In Which I Am Urged to Let Myself Go
• Treasure
• In Which I Am Given a Very Wide Berth
• The Cock-Eyed Southern Cross
• In Which It Will Go Heavily With You
• Dark Matters
• Notes
• Acknowledgements