Two Poems by Anne Rouse

Again

Blueish dusk pools in the public gardens.
I pull the curtains to against the street
and balustrade, white chessmen in a row.
The room’s chastened, unlit.

Out back, parallel old-brick walls,
adjacent gardens – shrubby fastnesses
where Eve might sit, under a pergola
–       exhale a quiet.

The sun glints out.  I move from window
to window. Enlist the lamp.
There is no health in us, I’d hear, a child
in choir robe and cassock (vermilion, as sin),

and still each nightward turn’s illuminated,
and every twilight’s brought
to lulling dark, a fairy tale grandmother.
Who to thank? Or simply hold each other.

Ballad of the She

Under the blade of the sun,
I heard a confession:
a daimon had said to a she,
‘Come lie with me,
be only mine’, and, frayed
into longing, she obeyed.

Now, maiden, fly,
take up your sack of joy.
The merry rivers run,
the tired thief is gone.
Fling off, as you find shelter,
faces you used to wear:

damsel, sleeper, silent one,
odalisque and mannequin.
Live out your truest word.
This was what I heard
(which was said, and done)
under the blade of the sun.

Anne Rouse lives in East Sussex. She's been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Glasgow and Queens University, Belfast. The Upshot: New and Selected Poems was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. Her new collection, Ox-Eye, will be out with Bloodaxe Books in the spring of 2022. She can be found on Twitter @rouseanne.