Patrick Lodge lives in Yorkshire and is from an Irish/Welsh heritage.
A retired academic, Patrick now devotes much of his time to writing and to reviewing poetry. His work has been published, anthologised and translated in many countries from the USA to Vietnam. Patrick has been successful in several international poetry competitions and is the is the winner of the 2015 Blackwater International Poetry Competition. He has read by invitation, at poetry festivals across Europe. He is currently working on a sequence commemorating Captain Cook’s first voyage to New Zealand in 1769. A poem from that sequence was put to music and preformed at the 2017 Leeds Lieder Festival.
His two latest collections, An Anniversary of Flight, and Shenanigans were published by Valley Press in 2013 and 2016 respectively.
SHENANIGANS
(On June 5 2014 BBC Leeds news reported that a fox was stealing dozens of shoes in a Leeds suburb and dumping them outside a woman’s house every night. Shenanigans is thought to derive from the Irish, sionnachuighim, which means I play tricks or, literally, play the fox)
I play the fox; what else do you expect in this
moony garden?
You stand, alone at the window, tall, white
as down,
staring as if I was will-o’-the-wisp,
a green-eyed seducer
versed with pulpit words. Nightly I come to you
with a sermon of shoes:
brogues, balmorals, wingtips, winkle-pickers
trainers and loafers.
Trophies lifted from careless men, cradled in this
cunning grin,
laid out for review and match. I preach a choice,
silly goose.
Let each man claim his own, tie you tight as a lace.
But don’t be deceived
by any glib-tongued spiel. Test the snout, the brush,
the shining pelt of it –
my fox paws are real, make no mistake. The woods
call us: stay wild and free,
put on your dancing shoes, step out, trot a tricksy
measure with me.
HER MOTHER’S FUR COAT
(“the end of the affair is always death”, Anne Sexton)
It wasn’t that cold
for October
in Massachusetts
enough chill
to make
her mother’s fur coat
a rational choice
fifteen years hanging
in the labyrinth
darkness of the closet
it rose
to the occasion
arms hung out
a dusty red embrace
you offer yourself to
Asterion
soused with vodka
old perfume reek
roaring
for the garage
where the obedient car
at one turn of the key
surged current
ignited the monster
V8 rumbles chthonic
falls back
to a muted chant
from the pit
the front seat a woman
regresses
into a fur coat
ringless to complete
a deeper circle head down
the engine will stop
the worn satin lining cool.
ERGO SUM (Venice, 2013)
These JYA1 girls pulse like shining
platelets, through backstreet San Polo;
scouringcalle or canal, clumping
in churchesand galleries, eager to
ensure everything sticks. Voices trill
likeburnished castrati, fluting up
columns and altars in search
of the awesome;the point, click, flash
epiphany of being there.
Maybe more opera buffa than serious
work; though, at sunset,as a vaporetto
sluices past San Marco, elevating iPads
andiPhones, the girls become numinous
as Tintorettocherubs,concelebrants
of the mystery of the eternal digital now.
1 JYA – Junior Year Abroad, an American educational programme.
UNCLE HO REMEMBERS
From the Saigon train,
all is earth or water.
Through window grills,
athin strip of sustenance
shinesbetween sea
and mountain jungle;
rice fields wanton with family tombs,
studded across the draughtboard
of water and berm.
Now the paddy dead
are become ancestors,
germin the cycle
of seed to spike to seed.
Across the tracks,
light cuts in low
from the tree line;
a cobra flaring, it recoils
from a red-starred obelisk
mooringa uniform
cemetery, a muffled hysteria
of plinths and plaques.
In this lake of abundance
which once snuffed
out the fire at its heart,
which dammed the flood
of bullets and bombs,
Uncle Ho remembers.
His lost family of liberation;
each a grain of gold,
never to ripen. Harvests pass;
nobody comes
to burn joss and paper,
tocall their name.
A child on a dyke imitates
his grandfather,
better to become him
when he teaches
hisown grandchildren
to follow the buffalo. He eats fruit,
recalls the planting of trees.
In his palm, a bowl of rice,
yellow as a pagoda wall.
ORKNEY: FOUR MINI SAGAS
(“firgivevussinnavora” – part of the Lord’s Prayer in Norn)
No1 Broughton
It’s a scream; that
here is where it starts.
Bluish shutters, salty,
wind-worried;
slats askew,
so that the rising sun
scratches a shadow ladder
only halfway up a wall;
no climb out of the hole from here.
Raise your eyebrows,
see it clearly –
skull, blood, bones.
We can’t escape.
On the Low Road
Driving from Isbister
at noon,
I see oystercatchers
probe for shellfish
but snub
the gull settled on the low road.
It rose from the tarmac,
was held spread-eagled in a crosswind,
like a totem image,
until the car’s impact
defleshed it,
disarticulated
the intricate bone structure,
gravely laid it aside.
Hamnavoe
Going home peaceful
from the Ferry Inn;
a cobbled carriage-track
curves away
glistening wet after rain.
It catches the sunset,
becomesa shimmering, swaying
path to somewhere else
that breaks apart as I walk it.
A piper starts up
withCumhanaCloinne,
the drone bringing
me back to earth.
Pierowall
Dawn. From the window,
a rainbow selects
Freya’s house
across the bay.
Fortunate people, sleeping
under a feather cover,
dream of transfiguration,
half their souls already lost.
A seal snouts seaweed rafts,
settling as the water recedes.
The fire hots up here;
closer, Freya cries bloodshot tears,
but stays cool.
