Patrick Mackie
Patrick Mackie is a London-born poet who grew up in Oman and England. His work first appeared in New Poetries II, published in 1999 by Carcanet. Since then he has authored two books of poetry, and one of prose: Excerpts from the Memoirs of a Fool (2001), The Further Adventures of the Lives of the Saints (2016) and Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces (2021). He lives in Gloucestershire.
Whether you can get there from here or wherever depends
on whether you are there already,
on whether you will find that you are already standing amidst
the outspread hands of its stones, and their misty grey dawns,
on whether indeed the arcs and folds of that sky
really can make all location moot or striated,
while nights come and go like berries that keep blurring and
falling as ripeness rips them sweetly to shreds,
or on whether the sun which sat
up above you just now like a potter staring
at his wheel is really a wheel itself,
one on which all this ground moves and is shaped,
coming back each time to the same basic emotions,
or in fact on how amply and tenderly the earth breathes in
and out with this single lung that the universe of
night gives it to sing in,
on how thirstily each ditch and puddle and streak
of water here or anywhere can drink up
the thousands of tiny spears of light that the sun
throws down out of its streaming bonfire of
mixed feelings,
or on how movingly the chestnut tree that was weeping
in small abundant fountains of raw white blossom
moments or in truth a couple of
months ago
is now studded with its own most brutal defences,
maybe it wants to show you how charged
its grasp of the soil that seizes and feeds and shreds it
remains, as the days loom and dissolve like clouds of
arrows, and the walls here too are as plangent in their soft grey strength
as, say, a rampart or bridge that you maybe glimpsed
in some photograph from an all too resonant archive,
and the cold winds here do indeed walk around like poets,
probing every wound for its outbreaks of light,
and you stand there shimmering like a tongue and watching like a
mouth,
in vital ways fairly stupid, and certainly neurotic
in the truest and most painful sense, but,
yes, moved;
the songs talk as steadily here as bones within the days’ burning
flesh,
and Europe keeps rushing down right past you into the permanent pale blue transience of the sea.
Patrick Mackie is a London-born poet who grew up in Oman and England. His work first appeared in New Poetries II, published in 1999 by Carcanet. Since then he has authored two books of poetry, and one of prose: Excerpts from the Memoirs of a Fool (2001), The Further Adventures of the Lives of the Saints (2016) and Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces (2021). He lives in Gloucestershire.