Rough Music by Fiona Sampson

Fiona Sampson was born in London in 1968. After a brief career as a concert violinist, she studied at Oxford University, where she won the Newdigate prize. Her collections of poetry include Folding the Real (2001); The Distance Between Us (2005); and Common Prayer (2007), which was shortlisted for the 2007 TS Eliot prize. She was shortlisted for the Forward Best Single Poem prize in 2006, and Rough Music was shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Best Collection prize. Fiona Sampson contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Irish Times and other periodicals, and in 2009 she received a Cholmondeley award and became a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature. Skater Out into the cold goes the line you draw across this pond. Under deep dark its track runs true as a dream, bruised and blue. Night is its own weather. A stillness gloves sheet-ice and sedge, that cluster of willows above the darkening rim. When you move and break the silence alarm thuds an ice drum tuned tight as the skin that binds your bones. In an elegant enlarging lens – silver, ornée – you and the moon must drown together. Go on, then, where glass waits to splinter and every step's new, your skates hush-hush your water-double through that broken mirror where moonlight hurls your shadow forward – The line behind you brightens with crystal, then darkens as you draw it out of your perfect future, that blank you recognise at every turn as you bank on a widening curve, and the ice-star at your foot pulses… Night, dark water and this is you, slicing the dream membrane that holds them apart – when out into the pond's cold eye you go alone. Deep Water Water levels still rising as thousands hit by worst floods in modern British history. – The Guardian 24/7/07 The spine drops its hook into the dark of the scan… At the Cobalt Unit, while storm rain drummed the roof, you lay motionless in the scanner. When the radiologist counted down you thought, I'm flying – your rick-rack bones opened into pinions every joint ratcheting out to wing-tips that floated on streaming black while the same blackness streamed between your ribs. Whenever you dream about the lake above Trisant where you used to fish for stickleback, you see high water roll noiselessly in and all of it lifted and gone: the anoraked boy and girl with their buckets, the blue Escort, the man smoking roll-ups some way off. … It seems to me you're on the high tide of life with the tar, the planks and dead birds, bloating. The Door The door opens on sun, and din from tractors working the land two farms away. Their tines rake clay lined with birds' bones or ropes of hay, a tally of the rural poor… Squint out at the day and you'll see how each door frames and crops a story: once upon a time. Like luck it's gone tomorrow. So seize the handle. Hinges strop but here's a squeezebox quarrelling into air, there horns' catarrhal sorrow, and now come sour familiar songs about lost girls, babies who disappear, lives wrecked by ancient wrongs, the poor unhoused, the rich unhorsed – all nights short and journeys long. Longing fills each note, and every word that isn't ought stinks of underworld. Smoke-filled memories… A trip to the unheard starts noisily. Your feet tramp a polka across the floor – then do-si-do out of key straight into hush and patter, the ghostly central reservation, moon flowers and the All Nite Service Station where a guitar picks out summer's end… see you in my dreams… And you're watching some radio hop counties far from any dialect you know as the tunes begin to blur till, in a layby dawn, the car's parked, and gleaming with melt. You yawn, stretch, haven't felt this young in years. So – open the door to suburban squelch and urban glow. Each step swipes shine from the foggy dew, but you know you're compelled by the town, and your feet obey their native beat, the one the tunes repeat, repeat – heart-holler and grief – At this rate you'll have no story left, just a paraphrase on a lyrics sheet. The grass ends in a maze of tarmac. But even as melody's atomised, losing its memory in the plural beat of the city, you hear that low C pedal. Buried tunes like grief, but walking.