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    The Authority of Roses
    The Authority of Roses
    The Authority of Roses
    Ebook105 pages42 minutes

    The Authority of Roses

    By Ross Leckie

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    About this ebook

    No postmodern gimmickry, no tricks except all the old ones that every good poet must learn: these lucid, evocative poems put the reader so clearly in the picture that you taste the blackberries of your childhood, shiver at the chill of rainwater down your neck in a western forest, or rake the dust from your hair as you trudge home from the Trojan War. Ross Leckie can capture the fleeting moments when we fully enter the world and believe we belong.

    At this low point in our country's cultural history, when more and more writers have become topical "content providers" for the ever-gaping maw of the society of the spectacle, those few artists like Ross Leckie who carefully craft their work within the poetic tradition, and who show respect for all the needs -- aural, esthetic, and intellectual -- of the most discerning readers, are more than ever to be valued.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateMay 15, 1997
    ISBN9781771311144
    The Authority of Roses
    Author

    Ross Leckie

    Ross Leckie is a Scottish author of historical novels, best known for his critically acclaimed Carthage trilogy. He attended Corpus Christi College at Oxford University, and has worked variously as a farm labourer, roughneck, schoolmaster and insurance broker. He has ten children, and now lives in Edinburgh

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      Book preview

      The Authority of Roses - Ross Leckie

      Wheelchair

      I.

      Water Finding Its Own Level

      During the Fall

      For John Reibetanz

      Rain: imagine the word standing

      in this ethereal glade, and listen

      to the hours patter on networks

      of spiring overgrowth, as if each leaf

      holds the limit of water's solidification.

      When an icy juice discovers its

      capillary surge through the fibers

      of your shirt, it clamps to your chest,

      to the small of your back. It curls

      along an eyelash and splatters

      when you blink. Focus the droplets

      that string themselves on webs,

      gather in blossom gullets, or

      distend along a single razor

      of grass. Soft beings bend gently

      to the weight. No keen thing

      remains so in this thick air.

      Breakwaters

      The stick sluices through the breach of matted leaves,

      a tumbling buoyancy, a quickening. I put it there.

      I couldn't bear the rain's mindless superfluity,

      the way it runnels in seeming perpetuity,

      next to the curb. Shaping the turgid mass

      of mud and mulch into long spindly spits

      that reach across the street, or dredging dams

      that hug the waters as if they were industry

      on the verge of economic collapse and decline

      toward unemployment. Will I be an engineer

      when I grow up? The currents now race

      and there eddy, then sidle left or right,

      looking for passage where they might condense

      and collect with other water, seeking its level,

      the placid espoir of the planet's mythology,

      final quietude in ocean and thickening seas.

      I place another twig into the snatch and thrust,

      watch it chute through the roil, then slow,

      follow it through a system of locks and canals,

      thinking the grandeur of liquid conduit,

      Amazonian dugout, primitive canoe, a Volga

      boat song, steamer churning up the Congo,

      St. Lawrence laker freighted with leftover ore.

      It wanders into the sewer. I glance into that simple hole

      which gurgles like the phantom of the opera.

      Currents change and breakwaters erode, slide, suspend,

      submerge – the street returns to its routine. It's time

      to turn from this river, this local run-off

      and its parish curriculum. I'm late for school.

      The Runner

      Where the distance between two points

      is a circle, the runner reacquaints

      himself with diversion. This curricular

      antinomy he allows himself. You are

      meandering somewhere when he slaps

      by, heading around the block, counting laps.

      If you consider it, he isn't in the least

      surprising to you yet you are released

      from your own footfall, left to

      count the steps of the runner who

      has disappeared around a corner.

      He vanishes around the corner

      as an act of self-effacement

      and what remains is the placement

      of figurines in a shop window.

      The figurines suggest everything we know

      about permanence and you suppose

      it is the same runner as he slows

      for a streetlight who has returned again,

      focusing your attention upon the way some men

      are embarrassed by their bodies. They glance,

      as they tug at their shorts in a bewildering dance,

      at the traffic that noses on its way

      toward its employment. It is always today

      for the runner whose force exerts

      itself to little purpose. Still, the runner flirts

      with tomorrow's contingency. If you know

      the runner personally, you do not wave hello,

      for his grim face is absorbed by what he isn't

      doing. Though you are engaged in the pleasant

      contemplation of a walk, the moment

      he breezes by you your thoughts are rent.

      You recognize that your strolling ends in death,

      so it is you, not he, who stops to

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