Janet Braithwaite has BA Hons. Degree in Classics from London University, a Post-graduate Diploma in Social Administration from London School of Economics and an MA in International Relations from Coventry University. She has worked in Greece, the UK and France. Janet has written poetry on and off most of her life, usually at threshold periods of deep change.
 

Note: For Part 1 and background see here.

 

THE YEAR OF JAPAN

May

Deep time 1

The rainbow drops of time I spend with you
are glistening prisms fracturing the shaft
of concentrated light and energy
into myriad opaline liquid
images,
multi-faceted, jewel-bright mirrors
filtering
the white-hot crazing current of soul-light,
danger-charged
until it earths and finds its outlet through
this burning brilliant held intensity
of our ephemeral dwindling time space.

Deep time 11

These few hours of deep-sea time
I spend with you
send subterranean forces
tidal-waving
through the time-loaded layers
of my geology,
exploding with volcano energy
memory’s mirror to experience,
bursting through fault lines of my reluctant
barricaded consciousness,
dredging up from the bedrock
of inheritance
haphazard depth-scoured flotsam,
storm-tossed sea drift
of small hard-core knowledges
worn down, hard won
from raw-edged jags of pain
by the patient passage of the years
- fragments
which current-swept together
reassemble,
coalesce tidal-sculpted,
water-beaten
into reconstructed forms,
as calm descends,
dawn-lustrous,
on the fresh-hewn shore
of my mythology.

 

 

THE YEAR OF JAPAN

May

Bank holiday

This time
when I took you by surprise,
calling late in the evening
at an hour when even you
would have left work and come home,
your face was open and your smile
held pleasure and that half amused,
lip-tilting, eye-glinting, much-loved
expectant curiosity
which recently lights up our talk;
and you let me
step over the guarded frontier
of your doorway,
trespass
on forbidden territory
one single step
out of the evening’s mild damp dusk
into the light
where you stand out of uniform,
barefoot
- the sudden erotic
vulnerability
of your small brown perfectly-formed
bare feet
brought close,
as, stooping, I retrieve my pen
and reel
with desire to touch, caressing
their small-boned delicate sculpted
beauty,
but I straighten and concentrate
my mind
on the map we hold together,
explaining possibilities
of geography for your journey,
as my senses bathe in the full
festive
summer closeness of your body,
exchanging the kind of smiles that,
centre-seeking,
dart through the eyes and pierce the soul,
before I step outside and say
goodnight.

 

THE YEAR OF JAPAN

July

When the empire leaves
I shall suffer the fate
of those who are won over
by the strange and foreign
and, magicked
by the lure
of language,
trust that
understanding
with the enemy
is possible
- brokers
who mediate
for love or profit
between cultures
- adventurers

who thrill to the siren sweet
ambiguous shadowlands
and lose their hearts
on the wrong side
of the frontier
- messengers across the lines
- interpreters
- all those who
venture their vulnerability
balancing on cobweb bridges
carved from mother of pearl,
complex and delicate
as filigree,
thrown tightrope frail
across the treacherous quicksands
of no-man’s-land,
and pit the heart’s fragility
against the barriers of custom
- all those who
at the last
abandoned
washed up
shallows-stranded
amidst the wreckage
of their fortunes,
stricken,
watch the last boat
cast anchor slowly
sliding seaward,
as the empire leaves
for ever.

 

THE YEAR OF JAPAN

July

Musing

In fact
you’re useless
as a muse –
muses are supposed
to loll around relaxedly
with their clothes in erotic disarray
waiting on the artist’s pleasure,
but you
are always
dashing back
straight to the office
mega-stressed and immaculate
in your well-pressed grey suit – not a moment
to spare as the faxes pile up,
immune,
politely resistant
to all my attempts
to slow down time’s hurtling passage
and get you to dally artistically
and prolong these few precious hours
- well once,
this summer’s
one hot day
you did actually
consent to sit on the hammock
sideways with your feet firmly on the ground,
but flatly refused to lie back
feet up
and relax
languidly
even when you got
slightly tipsy and flushed with wine,
though you did begin to swing to and fro
gently before leaving for work.

 

Worse still,
you are a man
- a singularly manly man.
Who’s heard of a masculine muse,
when poetesses are supposed
to get by somehow on their own
inspiration,
be Sapphicly self-sufficient
or even hermaphroditic
and unbemused?

 

THE YEAR OF JAPAN

And even worse,
you are from a culture
where men expect to be
haughtily dominant
and take the active part,
always hidden behind
the all-embracing mask
of uniformity,
shaped to conform and shun
the individual,
trained to repress the self
in favour of the mass,
where the delights of fantasy
are officially scheduled out
- imagination’s forbidden flowering
struggles etiolating in the dark.

Maybe
in this age
of commerce,
lines-written-per-hour-
poets-in-residential-homes-
keep-potential-subversives-inside-out-
of-community-care-fully-
gagged-bound-
paraded-
publicly-
in-chic-seminars-
inspiration-sold-with-coffee-
cash-in-on-interesting-minorities-
maximum productivity,
muses
can’t survive -
are passée
with their pastoral
idylls of generosity
and profligate riches of timelessness,
made for infinite dalliance,
and – like
the great god
Pan – are dead,
departed elsewhere,
redundant divines in excess,
reluctant refugees left over from
an unhurried unmoneyed past.

 

 

THE YEAR OF JAPAN

And I
out of joint
out of date
should abandon you
- get modern and profitable,
shrewd, disciplined and market-researchful,
untantalised by temptation,
but I
remember
how you once
twisted hands in hair
as language failed across the gulf,
torn between wanting and required duty,
physical and fraught with longing,
and I
can’t leave you,
frustrating
complex mystery,
who send my thoughts scintillating
in wild cascades across uncharted stars
or leave me stranded high and dry,
wordless
dumbfounded
blankly mute
alone and stifled
in my private silent wasteland,
or pierce with tidal shafts of clarity
as the lens’ brilliance shutters down,
deep sea
unfathomed
as you are.