Friday Poem – ‘From the Cockpit Window’ by Anne-Marie Fyfe

~ Seren Books

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘From the Cockpit Window’ by Anne-Marie Fyfe from her collection House of Small Absences.

This cover shows a painting of a girl carrying a dolls house, standing in the garden of big house. The text reads: House of Small Absences, Anne-Marie Fyfe

Anne-Marie Fyfe’s poems have long dwelt on the role that the spaces we inhabit, the places in which we find security, play in our lives: House of Small Absences is an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces—a deserted stage-set, our own personalised ‘museum’, a Piedmont albergo, underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage—the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life’s exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go…

From the Cockpit Window Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. – Elizabeth Bishop, The Man-Moth The full moon is being held hostage tonight. A two-hundred-&-seventy degree vista and all I make out are roof-garden umbrellas, latticed fire escapes, jungles of wisteria straggling around water-tower struts. Uplighters cast panther shadows and Egyptian columns against the cloudswirl that drapes the Chrysler pinnacle. There’s a low-altitude nosedive, a rattle of applause on the wing. Our world is hurtling towards sudden resolution. Tumbling zeros play needle roulette, the spirit bubble’s way out of kilter. Close enough now to smell garbage scows, charred pretzels, onions, to hear taxis honking, meters ticking, the steam whoosh of airshafts. On my tongue there’s the after-taste of metal fatigue. Who’ll answer my entryphone? How long before they empty the closet of shirts and jackets, their sleeves hanging aimless.

House of Small Absences is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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