Iain Twiddy: ‘Multiply’ and ‘Poplar Avenue’

Multiply

After Menelaus, massive, had spoken
in the embassy for Helen’s return,
his points refined, precise, the minimum number
to usher down a towering tree,

it was the turn of Odysseus, a head
shorter, narrower, standing planted on his staff
like the cloak of a man, his eyes shying
the ground like the midday shade in summer;

but when he opened his mouth to speak,
from deep, like snow brawling on a winter gale,
the words came blaring into the thick of the rug,
indelibly into the elders assembled.

Or so Antenor reports, years later,
frail as rigging, his head now mountain-crowned,
on the ramparts of the beetling Scaean gate,
scanning the clash taking shape before him;

and this is something Telemachus, as a kid,
far from the clashing tides of battle, not yet
its hissing aftermath, never gets wind of,
listening instead, all around the island,

to the constant washing of absence in,
growing there into his father’s shadow, the roar
of the water recalling the voice he doesn’t,
the snowy-foamed crashing crystal-clearly

refreshing how long he has been missing;
it’s a thing I could as well bear to him
in Ithaca as a snowflake intact in the hand,
one pinch of salt undissolving on the tongue,

as he could tell me of my father in return,
so I could know just a touch more the depth
of how unknown he really was to me,
given that we all exist thus, multiply,

as snow on the wind, as salt in the sea.

Iain Twiddy

Poplar Avenue

For eight years, riding to work, riding home,
through buzzing sun and slashing typhoon rain,
over slabs of ice and riverbed slush,
I have never left the main road to turn

into the stretch that ends in poplar avenue:
I have never seen them, quilled in winter,
spiked in the flesh of a grounded white bird,
never watched them whispering into leaf,

spreading the susurrous rumour of spring;
never watched the wind bend them, either side,
like reeds in a summer-deep river, as sun
begins sliding down Teine’s lower slopes;

for eight years, I have never parted them,
greeny curtains on a rain-thick evening,
or watched them squander their rich reds and gold
like torches smoking in a blue-lake sky.

For eight years, heading to work or just home,
turning neither left nor right, I have never felt
the shadows cast by poplar avenue,
its trees that live sixty, seventy years,

and now it is time to leave.

                                              Iain Twiddy