Four Poems by David Oyston
by David Oyston
March 2024
Gaft
Eliza preferred her first sense of the word,
gaft, spelt as if she’d heard a German term
like echt bent to English use—
A gaft freak.
That it came from
a regular verb was fitting, for in truth
Eliza was no true freak but the spit
of a stitch-tailed mermaid or shaven bear.
She’d made herself, bartered her sharp looks
for life on the low rung in the sideshow,
taking the disdain of her peers and the disgust
of tips drawn on the bally in equal measure.
She put in the hours getting her gaffed freak
on before her dole of mirror, quiet
with the tamped flame of those passing.
She’d eke out her chin and nose,
trim her inverted tonsure with a razor,
nudge into Koo Koo’s hoop specs
and hen feet, scooching into her tights
as you’d walk a wardrobe into a box room.
It bought her a place at The Hermitage,
where she owned property, found
her tithe of quiet in the unlit lanes between
the houses there and caravan hospital.
Riemann’s ladder
In Riemann’s empty caravan is a scaffold ladder.
When alive, he kept it with him at all times,
an ungainly tool as if it were half a maiden.
“A boy did in truth once use it as a drying frame
for wet trousers.”
The scaffold ladder has its uses.
The ladder’s form is three vertical planks,
steps running through the centre –
conjoined ladders left and right sharing a riser.
At a bespoke hanging, the dead needed to climb
a ladder to find the noose, so the hangman
climbed with him for compulsion or comfort.
Two went up and one came down.
Isabel told Guantes that, for Riemann,
the scaffold ladder was a symbol
he could not unsee lest its grip loosen,
yet whether he saw himself as the executioner,
the condemned or both no one knew.
“No one dared ask. They’d seen what happened
to the child who used it as a drying frame.”
“I believe Riemann saw himself as neither,”
Isabel said. “I believe he saw himself as the ladder,
and he insisted it always be in sight.”
Cara whispers at night to Erik in bedstink—
“You’ve said no in everything
except this: unhappiness.
This you grip.
The road
is a list of long rooms
and you seek out the hidden,
the room with a window
on an exterior wall yet no
corresponding space within;
a room the young might seek
but adults explain away
as nowhere. It is no place
as nowhere. It is no place
to stand. The human
passes beyond the walls,
and under the door the artless
shadows of feet step,
candlelight lambent at the jambs.”
Three sour tales
One night Isabel tells Guantes three sour tales
to make him shiver and herself warm.
That darkness in her—
An apple thief blinded for theft,
his eyes replaced with cold damsons
too large for his eye holes.
They’d squeak in complaint,
tiny fruit screeches almost inaudible
like girls skinned alive in the next village.
The creaks in the cart
that the Old Woman interprets
as the coming of the cold
fell crow-cut and wolf-fleet
rage of a lonely road
until Riemann broke that old woman’s bones
over the mouth of a well as if he were
crumbling a biscuit into the water.
The voice of the soil,
of how those buried alive came –
after weeks of screaming –
to hear the dirt around them mutter
in the small talk of mud
of nothingness and fate
and the cruelty of boots above—
“That’s not true,” Guantes whispered to her,
his heart held in the horror his imagination
had given him of being trapped fast
in a fist of gently-complaining soil.
“It’s a fact, Is. You can last
three weeks without food,
three days without water
and three minutes without air.”
Isabel was deeply hurt.
“Old stories have nothing to do with facts.
Old tales are the box all the facts come in.
That’s why children play in them.”
