Days of Wine and Roses by Chris Athorne

Days of Wine and Roses

Late summer listening to jazz; the windows,
open, tempt in a piece of the night,
a coptering whir, burr of dusty wings,
a flick-book rainbow, all the colours of music;
but stopped, hid in some unlit niche.

Next morning, moving chairs, there’s
a dull dart beneath the sill. Don’t try
to pare apart the rigid vanes. As a child
I learnt the mysteries of the killing jar
and the gentle persuasion of opening,
the body soft and seeming warm,
the pinioning of wings – whilst rigour
pinned the bright oranges, yellows, reds –
to a small cross, the memory of what had passed.

CHRIS ATHORNE

…………………………………………………

There is both a celebratory and a melancholy tone to this short poem. A jazz performance in a domestic setting is intruded upon by a ‘piece of the night’, a colourful flying insect (an Orange Underwing moth, Athorne has confirmed) that reflects the vibrancy of the music as it darts about the room until it settles somewhere out of sight. Discovered the next morning, it is now ‘a dull dart’. What was open and flamboyant is now closed over, hidden. The spirit ventures out and the spirit retreats.

The poet’s mind goes back to boyhood when such creatures would be captured and inspected in (marvellous phrase!) ‘the killing jar’. The curious child blends wonder at nature with the spirit of solitary, scientific discovery. It is a far cry from the warmth of human company and musical communion in the later domestic scene. Perhaps the insect is a reminder to Athorne of the part of the self that is temporarily missing in such contexts. This poet who also happens to be a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics is well placed to explore the complexity, if not division, of self, as embodied in a scene of adult sociability and (remembered) childhood solitariness.

In the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown’s poem ‘The Cloak’, the poet is a figure in mask and cloak who flits about the fair entertaining people, but the aftermath is different:

Under the last dead lamp
When all the dancers and masks had gone inside
His cold stare
Returned to its true task, interrogation of silence.

Athorne’s poem captures this feeling of aftermath, the tristesse that we commonly feel after we’ve had a good time and let ourselves go. But there is meaning in that return to a more hidden, solitary, even Christ-like self, ‘pinned… to a small cross’.

David Cameron

You can find a bibliography of Chris’s published poetry here.