Four Poems by Katharine Towers

song, thrush

a song thrush
slightly lackadaisical
in thrall to triplets

or slightly entranced
by the placing of items
in their correct order

this note – that note – that note
no, that note first – then this – or this
like the widower of a year

setting favourite cups
on an old dresser
and taking them down

because memory is not served
unless the whole thing is
perfectly artful and careless

a song thrush
slightly addicted to
secret patterns of three

may wish to tinker
for ever and a day with
the eternal tonic sol-fa

and is not to bother about mistakes
or the horrible awkward silences
for all this must happen

on the upwardly-curved branch
of a leafless and very
old oak before it is dark

robins

robin singing in a mossy old elder
whose dry branches are held together
by moss and gold oddments of lichen

singing to his other self who is buried
in a holly bush dark as a cupboard
and who proffers the same song almost

not what you would call a correction
something more in the manner of

have you considered likewise such and such
(or instead)

robins one and two taking turns
never interrupting

trying out politely
a variation or a snub

robin one singing with a kindly warning
to his other self who is invisible
in a bush and is also his rival

do not think to enter my perfect garden
do not think to fly to my perfect yellow elder
do not think I want your life
do not put those things into a song

robins one and two singing loudly

let us agree to differ
let us agree let us sing
in turn our almost identical different oddment song

Snowdrop

A drop of snow does not exist
but it is here in the mind’s eye,
made from weather

and a shape that’s the wrong word.
They’re a colour that is not,
except of chalk and milk.

A drop of snow does not exist
but it is here

artisanal and metaphoric,
deep in the mind’s hard ground.

Petrichor

It has the blackbirds clucking and rummaging in the hedge,
although who knows if a blackbird can smell
the green wet slightly chemical smell of two flints
knocked together – which is partly where the word comes from,
the other part referring to whatever it is that swills
instead of blood through the veins of the gods

and it turns out that what the blackbirds are flustering about
is a made-up word, and that before there could not have been
this green wet slightly chemical smell of flint and immortals
in our streaming dripping garden this afternoon.

Katharine Towers has just published Oak, her third full collection with Picador. The Floating Man (2010) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and The Remedies (2016) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her work has been read on Radios 3 and 4 and she also writes an occasional blog about Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.  She lives in the Peak District.