SALLY GROSSMAN ~

 

S A L L Y      G R O S S M A N

the album cover of album covers

photograph:

Daniel Kramer

RE-READING ROSEMARY TONKS ~

 

R O S E M A R Y    T O N K S

Addiction to an Old Mattress

No, this is not my life, thank God ...

... worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag;

Obsessed first by one person, and then

(Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another;

These Februaries, full of draughts and cracks,

They belong to the people in the streets, the others

Out there – haberdashers, writers of menus.

Salt breezes! Bolsters from Istanbul!

Barometers, full of contempt, controlling moody isobars.

Sumptuous tittle-tattle from a summer crowd

That’s fed on lemonades and matinées. And seas

That float themselves about from place to place, and then

Spend hours – just moving some clear sleets across glass stones.

Yalta: deck-chairs in Asia’s gold cake; thrones. 

Meanwhile ... I live on ... powerful, disobedient,

Inside their draughty haberdasher’s climate,

With these people ... who are going to obsess me,

Potatoes, dentists, people I hardly know, it’s unforgivable

For this is not my life 

But theirs, that I am living.

And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day after day.

__________________________

Rosemary Tonks

Bedouin of the London Evening:

Collected Poems & Selected Prose

(Bloodaxe Books, 2014)  

© Estate of Rosemary Tonks 2014, 2016.