Introducing Mr Cribs


Mr Cribs his Recognition

I wrote your book on the side
of a sheet of paper
I can write
very small so that a pair of glasses
sliding down your nose gets
harder to see as it slaps the floor
once before shuttering filled with air

the rest is silent
a painting
by Sisley that really appears
to be smoking a cigarette but this is now
and that was

did I mention the book
is actually a scroll so the scope is
even smaller cut through
with Poe's anguish the way the sky
saves the sky from falling
his final days as the perfect biographer





a clue

opening the drafts bristles of a quill
escape drooping in ink Mr peacock is
fantastical his murder of thoughts
washed away by rain

'I can see you' the outline
of a life spent defining social habits
inclining to the maudlin sighs over
a broken bridge you lift me to your lips
implying the 19^th century Dear Romans,
I am alive and well, reborn a Darwinian.
You are right, my faith knows no bounds.

Madame Blavatsky thinks among the mountains
how to create a valley to throw this
into some small relief invoking the first
principle of karma tears flow upward
into the water of life to be written down

you leave your card on the table Mr Cribs
I will call for it





a ship is always made from the logs of culture

because Carol Watts lives in London

some one some thing quickens
is born murdered
magnified through the eye
of this exquisite needle

fast busy unpredictable glancing
a resonant glimmering crackles with ideas
of a sole female passenger

the exigencies of weather
fictional and historical small terror

a surge of prose chronicles
the cultural work of empire





otherwise and elsewhere

do you know what I would say to you
Mr Cribs on the subject of weather

language has become a site of wonder
and amazement you want to sing?
OK Mr Cribs after all poetics intertwine
with translated contact zones of a
haunted post-coloniality


even when
the language knows warbled around
a page of instant revisions

echo mockery release
the very thing
you want to bring
to the instrument in your manger





the beginning

It was interesting that you mentioned Kew. I haven't visited since I was a child, but looking again at your letter the seeds of memories are popping through. I will be in London in May and will make sure to go back. Perhaps you would like to join me? It would be lovely to have a guide.

Mr Cribs, I think our work is more consciously, if still only slightly consciously connected





a magnolia for violet

how do you wear your tie
such a full life her telegram
from the queen she travelled widely
as president of the international
camellia society
a rare plot
was rooted in the garden centre
yesterday ever
the charitable giver (conventions to
China) she opened up for the public
its halfway house
teenagers
still exist today in honour of
the secret to her longevity





to Helen and the doomed cadets

a city of pigs and horses
Mr Cribs will you take a ride?

the street car makes its way
along fourth avenue with an
ear infection and a bad cold

it was faster and harder
than gradations in rank
and standing
a city of
agricultural society
silent in that solitude
which is not loneliness
but language

Mr Cribs the ground for
further construction is never
happy on this earth

your sure sense of cadence
is an unforced immediacy of meaning
our most indefinite conception


© Nathan Thompson 2009



Sources:
Poe - A Life Cut Short, Peter Ackroyd (inc. back of jacket blurb)
Wrack, Carol Watts (inc. back of jacket blurb)
The Jersey Evening Post (24/25 february)
Cribs, Yunte Huang (inc. back of jacket blurb)