Judith Taylor

I come from Strathmore originally but moved to Aberdeen a couple of years ago after a number of years living in Fife. I have been writing poetry for about 15 years and I find landscape is a big influence, so moving to a city is bringing about some changes in my work. My poetic heroes are Robert Browning, Fleur Adcock, Iain Crichton Smith and Louise Gluck – this week, anyway.

BLINK

The small enlightenments        never stay.
The sun goes in again

and buildings lose their glitter;    the birds sulk.
Your new-unfolding vistas disappear
with the shimmering air   above your street.

All of a sudden your hair is filthy again,
your nails      eaten away.

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PASTORAL

It belongs to the woman downstairs
but it's out of control, and gets no tending: still,
the rhubarb, I am pleased to see,
has lived to tell of another East-coast winter.

And peely-wally spring, as it is round here,
appears to have started. Wee white flowers are hanging their heads;
wee brown birds are cheeping
in bare trees, between downpours:

if you didn't know it was spring, you would never know
it's spring. It's a change of heart
without a change of expression. It's just like

watching one of the men round here
to see if he loves you too. There's no
telling.

But the rhubarb waits
for no sun's invitation. Breaking loose
like a laugh in the kirk, she butts her carmine tips
from winterlogged soil, and brings her love to town –

a lipstick kiss
on a dirty mirror, blotting the grey
we're so acclimatised to.
And the lips are singing:

Take it away,
sister! Lose that guy
with the frozen attitude. Listen,
sister, he's last year's face.

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SPACEMAN

Nothing moves in the same way.
Your feet become self-conscious,

very deliberate; and the dust
washes and drains around your boots
like finely-powdered water.

Ears filled with your working noise,
you are nevertheless aware

– how? can you see it? – of utter silence
deep outside, pressing against your cold additional skin.

You observe this empty place,
cloudlessly lit in every detail
under a dark sky. What will you say

of any of this,
this nothing, when you go home?

And what will the others say to explain
the weighted motion and the quiet
suiting you now?

– they are going to see it on you
always. Decades later, you'll acknowledge it:

In the minds of those around me, I went
to the moon.

[Note: the last two lines are taken from an interview, broadcast in 1999, with Buzz Aldrin]

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