Lucy Hamilton Poetry

Poems from Of Heads & Hearts

You can buy Of Heads & Hearts from Amazon or direct from Shearsman, the publisher.

Flags & Headbands

The Engineer admits that the plethora of Union Jacks & England Flags has finally tested her patience: the Corsican Testa Mora is a small act of sabotage on Bastille Day and in the run up to the London Olympics. It looks great hanging from her bedroom window next to the neighbour’s St George’s Cross as I stroll with the Polymath to the Asian corner shop for milk & Le Monde. The emblem prisoner – head detached – is a timely reminder of the clearing of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula. And now she’s telling us – slightly abashed by a gap where her tooth should be – how Pasquale Paoli adopted the flag in 1760 to continue the tradition of independence. Freedom must walk by the torch of philosophy he declared, re-styling the blindfold into a sporty headband.

Women & Men

It needs the solid knowledge of a soul
Who having lived and loved in a woman's body
has also lived and loved in the body of a man.

Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid – ‘Tiresias’

The Entrepreneur is blogging. Not about Nero’s poor young slave Sporum – aka Sabina. She doesn’t know about Pope Joan or the Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum and it’s unlikely that Sandra does either. In any event Sandra isn’t saying. She is choosing new hair. She removes her old blond day wig, suddenly naked in her own shaved grey. She takes her time, gazing at the mannequins, fingering the soft filaments in her large & shapely hands. Little does she know that the Chevalier d’Eon was a male French diplomat & mistress to Louis Quinze – that he too spent the second half of his life as a woman. If she knew she might ask as Jupiter asks: In their act of love who takes the greater pleasure, man or woman? On the other hand Sandra has chosen so presumably she does know. She has her sorrows but blindness is not one of them. And now she splashes out, popping both Charlotte and Kaleigh into her roomy bag.

(‘Women & Men’ was first published, along with three other poems by Lucy Hamilton, in Issue 211 of PN Review)

Heads & Hats

The Polymath is wearing a straw hat to protect his head. He walks ahead, hands and fingers weaving a rhythm as he composes and conducts. For one who claims he cannot sing he brims with the poésies that always sing to me. And even brimless hats can sing. The Art Dealer’s bronze insignia once held a gemstone in its centre and was worn to ornament the red, yellow or purple turban atop a sheikh’s noble head. Now the Polymath’s saying that the Mexican Hat diagram represents the allowable states in the system and the height is the system’s energy and – silly me! – the equilibrium state is the peak of the hat and the minima are just inside the rim in the form of a complete circle. But all I can see is the photo he took on our honeymoon: twenty-five men in sombreros on the back of a truck somewhere in Chihuahua.

Blood Letting

I

The Engineer says the priest came to hear her confession but she couldn’t think of anything terrible she’d done. [The dialyzer is the key to haemodialysis.] She is tearful & apologetic. Calls herself grouchy mess and hysterical witch. She’s so wired-up that the ‘ports’ look like multi-coloured hair bobbins. [The average person has 10 to 12 pints of blood; during dialysis only one pint (about two cups) is outside the body at a time.] I collect up phone, cards & photo of L. Follow her bed out of the HDU back to the ICU. Sometimes her large brown eyes seem to rest on me.

II

Sometimes her brown eyes settle on me. Like a butterfly on my skin. Her hair is feather-soft. She complains it hasn’t been washed. [There are two sections in the dialyzer; the section for dialysate and the section for blood.] The nutritionist asks what she likes to eat. Anything Mediterranean. Then removes the untouched sausage and mash. [The two sections are divided by a semi-permeable membrane so they don’t mix together.] I hold the Engineer’s hand. We look at the photo of L. Fifteen & sitting her mocks.

III

Other times her eyes are eloquent. Large white rather than brimstone yellow. The nurse explains why she keeps being moved between IC & HD. Her washed hair fans out dark against the pillow. [The dialysis solution is then flushed down the drain along with the waste.] We talk about medieval blood letting – she almost laughs. Doctors optimistic but. Stress situation might change & suddenly.

IV

Nor butterfly nor Engineer. Eyes barely slits in the setae. No more to flit from iPhone to photo. Never to rest on me. Nor blood nor dialysate – the machines are silent, pushed aside. Her head seems slighter, hair curtained against her face, lips a little parted. One cold hand grips and olive wood cross. As I lean to kiss her brow, it’s as if she chose to speak … For, if I imp my wing on thine, affliction shall advance the flight in me.

(‘Blood Letting’ was highly commended and featured in the Forward Book of Poetry 2019)

Pictures & Frames

The Diarist is writing a century after the Expeditions. She is not famous but is courageous & resolute, delving deep, excavating through layers of memory and silted-up grief. She is trying to form a greater picture, framing the two explorers in a diptych as they set off in the same year, same century. Unlike the men, she has achieved a venerable store of years. She wants to shift her obsession to theirs just as Pennel ‘swung’ the ship for compass adjustment – to absorb herself in their joys & trials until the end, so her pain becomes theirs and so their acceptance and grace – I ought not to complain, but it is hard to be philosophic – becoming hers, might deepen into … no, not closure – into a kind of forgiveness.

The Polar Museum Cambridge – Polar Muse Project

PN Review Volume 41 Number 2 Issue 220

Letters & Diaries

She will call them Capt. S. & Dr. S. she thinks, making a list, wryly noting the absurdity of her (Tesco) inventory alongside theirs as she fixes her stick & bag on the scooter that’s a sledge without huskies, thinking her cleaner will bring in the goods like a Sherpa. She too has a team – daughters & sons & grandchildren, a nurse bandaging the ulcerated leg in the comfort of … oh to think of the frost-bite in that tent, to contemplate the swamps, the malaria & beri-beri – but where to start, how to sort & sift & record? She must re-read the letters and diaries as her strength & sight allow – make lists, keep a journal of scraps & fragments, positioning the magnifying-glass to bring it all closer, amplifying the past in small stages.

The Polar Museum Cambridge – Polar Muse Project

PN Review Volume 41 Number 2 Issue 220

Ice & Tears

Here is a man who knows he is going to die. The boy will be your comfort I had looked forward to helping you to bring him up but he it is a satisfaction to feel that he is safe with you … and the Diarist flicks to the photograph, envisaging the frost-bitten lips, those final moments in the tent with his two surviving companions. Dr S. on the other hand, snatched away in a freak coincidence: a policeman knocking on the Fellow’s door, where the student, the brilliant but now psychotic student – adj. recorded 1910 – opened fire on them all. She leans over the magnifying-glass, moved almost to tears by the quoted words she knows so well … Of this tragedy, with its waste and misery, I can neither write nor speak.

Glaciers & Robins

Dante was right when he placed the circles of ice below the circles of fire.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

The terrifying ice-cliffs are always changing, writes the Diarist, constantly repelling and attracting. How did they survive the long winter? Did they quarrel? Yes sir, damn you sir. This morning, sitting outside on her scooter, she’d begun to pull ivy from the primroses when the robin arrived like a spirit into the tiny world – so close she could see its black eye. She studies the photo: I hate the way we seem so small in the menacing vastness, pulled down to unspeakable depths. Those who’d returned like Cherry-Garrard were never the same. Yes, and then suddenly her scooter had shifted, tilted, and was rolling down the bank towards the stream. And there she was, inches from the water grappling for her phone as the image of poor Cherry flashed into her mind, swinging in his harness above the dark void.

Orthogonals & Transversals

The Architect is working on a painting overlooking the Tarn, which he started during his annual painting trip to France. He’s enraptured by the pink brick of Albi Cathedral blazing like a rose in the Midi sun. He sighs, twiddles his chubby fingers and sips his pint of Adnams. Today has not gone well. Years enslaved by perspective and a prodigious memory! He’s Theseus in a labyrinth of orthogonals & transversals whose Ariadne has snapped the thread of the ball she is spinning. The polymath suggests a trip to the Blue Ball at Grantchester.

Shifting his pint, the Architect spreads the photos of his paintings. It’s a tour of aqueducts & amphitheatres, rock faces, gorges, castles & cathedrals. I search for his faithless Ariadne, willing her to emerge from a glint of river, a spiral cloud, a flash of red hibiscus. I asked about the recent commission. Finished, he says cheerfully. The Royal Scot steaming on Platform 2, the commissioner’s father – tam o’shanter and hackle cocked at a jaunty angle: Royal Scots Fusiliers, 1st Battalion. And I know that everything is to scale – meticulous and flawless.

(‘Transversals & Orthogonals’ was first published, along with three other poems by Lucy Hamilton, in Issue 211 of PN Review)