Christine Thorpe, a native of Penticton, BC, is the Development Co-Ordinator for Poetry London. Before settling on English Literature as a field of study, Christine studied biology, mathematics and computer science. Her two books, A Rind of Sun (Serengeti Press, 2008) and Tendered Arms (Manifold Books, 2011) are co-authored with James Wood, whose drawings ``complete`` selected poems.
Her poems ``are addressed to `those who feel in each bright stream, the pull of an underground river`. Willing readers are drawn from personal crossroads into subtly strange lands where skies may be truly falling but the play of imagination endures. Each poem tells its own tale.``
Ms Thorpe will be the featured poet at the March 6th London Open Mic Poetry Night at Mykonos Restaurant at 7:00 pm. She will read from her book Tendered Arms (2011).
1. What Passes for Conversation
Her poems ``are addressed to `those who feel in each bright stream, the pull of an underground river`. Willing readers are drawn from personal crossroads into subtly strange lands where skies may be truly falling but the play of imagination endures. Each poem tells its own tale.``
Ms Thorpe will be the featured poet at the March 6th London Open Mic Poetry Night at Mykonos Restaurant at 7:00 pm. She will read from her book Tendered Arms (2011).
1. What Passes for Conversation
We sit at right angles, you and I
with a curious lamp
attentive in the corner,
light probing each face
flowing over the planes
coursing the deeper lines
discovering imperfection.
The light casting thought
onto a shelf of shadow where,
unattended, it desiccates
then drifts away
on the eager breath
of pretense and prevarication.
© Christine Thorpe
2. After the Circuit
A girl, styled in ferocity,
indelible body-art,
hair spiked, skin studded,
stands at the locker-room mirror
perfecting brows, angular,
black on pale forehead.
She turns to me, mimes
the unplugging of ears
(I pause my MP3 novel)
and asks me, treadmill-tired:
Can you see if they’re straight—
I don’t think they are, can you tell?
I assess her brows for balance,
offer reassurance, turn away
this too-disarming gaze . . .
before shields, breastplates clatter about us,
before we sit down amongst the ruins
and weep for lost tenderness.
© Christine Thorpe 2011
Tendered Arms, Manifold Books
3. Agrotis ipsilon, unobserved
Toes, cool on evening patio stones,
curl, imagining leaf-mould,
damp soil in garden depths
beyond the conversation.
Tongues, wine-eloquent, compete
for fragments of attention;
the fingertips of friendship
settle, then flutter off again.
Talk becomes exclamation
at sparks above the grass
of an undefended zone, dark
outside our civil circle.
We are wise
and put neither fireflies in jars
nor fallen stars in pockets.
We know consequences.
But the motivations of the firefly
are beyond us, and we turn our backs
to the black cutworm in his tunnel feasting
on a harvest of impatiens.
Borders have shifted, dew intervenes;
skunks, slugs slip through the hostas,
and we, being short-sighted, remain
captives of delight.
© Christine Thorpe 2011
Tendered Arms, Manifold Books
4. Composition
In the kitchen where words
are exchanged for knives,
and embarrassed tears
for crescents of ice,
I choose the straight blade,
you the serrated, to chop
this pepper, fennel, tomato.
We work the cold from our shoulders,
pour scotch, stir pots, sweep
eggshells from the floor,
out to the garden’s farthest edge
where asparagus sprouts
on its fire-blackened bed.
© Christine Thorpe
5. Dustward
It isn’t the prospect of death
so much as approaching decrepitude
and the irresistible pull of disorder
that has me downcast.
The way the house tends to sag and leak
or the car to squeak and rust.
Pay the money, make the repairs,
blame the laws of thermodynamics.
I find my equilibrium,
for the moment forgetting
the same laws pertain
to this personal frame.
Muscles are dwindling, arches have fallen,
thinning bones are constantly cold,
and this cashmere sweater has more pills
than the super-sized bottle of vitamin D
I bought to defer the damage
which living does to the DNA.
Today I was wiping dust
from the tops of doorframes
and musing about fallout
of various sorts, all carried
in the fine-ground cosmic drift.
© Christine Thorpe 2011
Tendered Arms, Manifold Books
6. Flutter
It might fall
from the leaves
of a tedious book
you never could finish,
Ulysses perhaps.
Your heart in a letter,
a letter not sent
in a novel unread,
marks the place
where you stopped
caring
for the story and what I thought
of your valiant erudition.
Marks the day you withdrew
your heart from mine,
transcribed with haste,
misplaced in shame,
at the time
it stopped
loving.
© Christine Thorpe
7. Memoirist
You’ve a crafty lure
fashioned from rainforest feathers
and in it you’ve stitched
a barbarous hook designed
to snag what swims in the past
yet longs to be remembered.
You’ve also a spoon
curved to sparkle, dipped in spices
enticing to shades of the unrecalled.
Your angled line draws them up
from the endless drift that rocks
a barnacled wreck of dreams.
The catch is assured
by silent oars and patient landings;
they’ll flop for a time in the panicky air
then pass through memory’s foyer
into the salty larder which feeds
the urgency of your story.
© Christine Thorpe 2011
Tendered Arms, Manifold Books
8. Next in Line
You gave her skates on her birthday
and an afternoon of being
mother/daughter rollers in the park.
You demonstrate the stride;
she’s awkward in the wake
of your practiced glide.
She imitates and stumbles
after speed and grace,
a taut grimace at your back.
The path between you stretches;
attention’s tether snaps
through hot air, wavy over asphalt.
Your smile leaps forward
to an undercover evening
with a yet-to-be admitted lover.
Ahead and on your mobile
in a giddy conversation,
you loosen the knot of good intent.
She’s fisted desperation,
pumping, trailing,
spattered with your free and easy laughter.
© Christine Thorpe 2011
Tendered Arms, Manifold Books
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