Poem
Patrick McGuinness
from The Book of Afternoon Sleeps, by Liviu Campanu
from The Book of Afternoon Sleeps, by Liviu Campanu
from The Book of Afternoon Sleeps, by Liviu Campanu
That dream again: I’m hooked up to a transparent dripfull of hours, to replace the lost hours spent watching
the rain bead up the window, feeling the sex
dry on the thigh like the second skin it soon became:
the aggregate of all those public holidays we spent in bed
while your fat-fingered husband (he’s light-
fingered too – how does he manage that?)
inspected troops or tractors, collecting his Politburo
arse-blisters, his parade-ground pins and needles.
He’d sit in Capsia after a hard day’s delegating,
blow his nose on the embroidered napkin
he’ll wipe his mouth with later,
and put a two-man tail on the House Special.
While we – two boats cresting the same slow wave, or,
to put it more prosaically, two bodies carried by the same long fuck –
'd enjoy our all-day docking at the jetty that kisses the water.
This winter, I have each gone minute of our time
stored up like city heat in bricks; in other words,
they’re seeping out faster than I can hold them in.
In yet other words, they’re not stored up at all.
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© 2013, Patrick McGuinness
This poem purports to be a translation of a poem by Romanian poet Liviu Campanu. Campanu is a fictional character, who appears in Patrick McGuinness\' novel The Last Hundred Days.
Patrick McGuinness
(Tunisia, 1968)
Patrick McGuinness is a poet, novelist, translator and academic, a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where he has taught since 1998. He lives in North West Wales. His poetry, published by Carcanet, has won an Eric Gregory Award, the American Poetry Foundations Levinson Prize in 2003, the Poetry Business Prize in 2006, ...
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from The Book of Afternoon Sleeps, by Liviu Campanu
That dream again: I’m hooked up to a transparent dripfull of hours, to replace the lost hours spent watching
the rain bead up the window, feeling the sex
dry on the thigh like the second skin it soon became:
the aggregate of all those public holidays we spent in bed
while your fat-fingered husband (he’s light-
fingered too – how does he manage that?)
inspected troops or tractors, collecting his Politburo
arse-blisters, his parade-ground pins and needles.
He’d sit in Capsia after a hard day’s delegating,
blow his nose on the embroidered napkin
he’ll wipe his mouth with later,
and put a two-man tail on the House Special.
While we – two boats cresting the same slow wave, or,
to put it more prosaically, two bodies carried by the same long fuck –
'd enjoy our all-day docking at the jetty that kisses the water.
This winter, I have each gone minute of our time
stored up like city heat in bricks; in other words,
they’re seeping out faster than I can hold them in.
In yet other words, they’re not stored up at all.
Send more.
from The Book of Afternoon Sleeps, by Liviu Campanu
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