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Poem Of The Week: From Cheshire By Kit Wright

From Cheshire
For Anna

Come home safe: I think of you driving
Over the Runcorn Bridge in our senile car,
Its toothless ratchets, arthritic pistons conniving
To take me away from wherever you are.

Its steering like that old prostitute working a living
on Huskisson Street outside our door:
Its raggedy brake shoes thin as the wind, giving
Nothing but ice to your foot on the floor.

Please come home: I think of you leaving
For ever, coming from Cheshire, only the snow
And the night and the endless black road, no retrieving
Of you: without me, wherever I go.

A poem of love, vulnerability, and to some extent, desperation, Kit Wright's profoundly affecting quatrains are delivered in a somnolent metre whose rhythm seems to slow as the verses unfold. The languid rhymes, whose 'arthritic' posture works to mitigate the rickety motor's terminal decline, are purposefully laboured.

Overlain with necrotic adjectival accretions, the tableau moves inexorably towards inertia, as if to exacerbate the narrator's longing; the beloved figure's journey, at least in the narrator's worst imaginings, is diminished to a winter-bound standstill. Marooned in a cold and remote landscape - 'only the snow / And the night and the endless black road' - the figure cast in darkness is beyond the poet's repeated pleas.

'From Cheshire' is taken from Bump-Starting the Hearse, published by Hutchinson (1983)

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