2 Poems by Julie Hartley
Clown Queen
What you see here
is a bunch of child-balloons
bright-ribboned and
deflated as puckered bellies,
crow-winged and caught,
flapping from wires, outside
the window of a girl who
let go. The child’s face
is pressed into the
disappointment of a
grey day, her nose flat
as a gravestone. There is
a woman on the street
below balloons, beneath the
window, who is England’s
Queen. Head held aloft,
one hand hooked onto
fox skin bag and twisting
in a royal wave, she
is propelled by invisible
corgis. The Queen pauses
underneath the television
screen of the child’s
window and switches channels.
In the window now,
gravestone nose becomes
a trunk, skin puckered and
so long it curls in
fossil whorls against window
glass in a hoped-for glass
smashing, a mournful reaching
out for lost balloons. The Queen
switches channels. Now
the balloons are a nest of
ostriches and the child
one of those monkeys with
hand-suckers sticking to
glass. The Queen switches
channels and the child is a slug.
The child is the slug it will
become in thirty years, sloth-sunk
into sofas, waving the munched
leaf of a TV remote. The
Queen switches channels
and the child is a baby ostrich
trapped the wrong side
of the glass, blinking. The
ostrich blinks. Down in the
street now is a multi-coloured
clown held aloft by a
grape-bunch of bright
balloons, dancing on helium
air, bayed at by foxes,
propelled by a cart-pull
of corgis. Here. Look. The
clown-queen tightropes
between telegraph poles
outside the nose-pressing
window of a child.
Do you see?
Snow Suitor
Snow is running through subways
fast and slantwise as a train
clattering a rice-spill of flakes onto faces.
Under shivering tracks, small nests
of curdled milk for a lying-in
of mud-coloured mice. Snow
pools and arcs in the ticket-seller’s
eyes, blood-shot, and he cries
through the red ice of tears, though
his lips smile, always. Today, snow runs
in his veins, gathering in the
dark corners of a secret heart,
clogging up a click-shunting muscle
and through the drift on drift
and snow on snow bursts
the arterial train, stopping. The man
who leaps down into heartstorm
is his lover, heel-dancing on the
soft red tissue of each beat,
trampolining through his passion
as on a thin sliver of too-fresh meat.
There is snow on the sleeves of his
jacket. Icicles, dangling from his lobes.
These men: they watch each other from
inside the snow-whirl of a ticket-seller’s
heart, and the lover, quick-fading,
steps back into whiteout. The parent heart
gives birth to a wild wind sigh.
His hand sells a ticket. His eyes swing
to a clock. He smiles, always and sadly.
His shift will end, soon, with the storm.
