Frances-Ann Norton: Poetry

The Waterwheel Once Again: Mrs Rochester’s Story Drawn as I am to it I fear it too Its dark beauty and power Black with age and use Cups again and again the soft water. Made mild by dale and stone The drip, drip, drip of Mother Shipton’s cave Petrifying a hat, a ballet shoe An umbrella Hanging like excavated Pompeian Artefacts. There is no wheel there in the Garlic forest up in the hills A damp cave for a home. Driven from town as a witch she was feared and saught. This wheel is an attraction so great I abhor it. It has a pull on me. The rhythm of its rhyme, the rhythm of its rhyme, the rhyme of its rhythm A repeated phrase In mechanical shouts And watery gutturals The crank and grind of it The burden of industrial weight  The insolent preponderance of it pulls my eyes unwillingly to its black presence Its perpetual motion Hypnotic Wavering on a precipice How easy, how freeing just to let go ...

A Hardy Tragedy of Sorts I’ve given all my barley for a single silk purse My bonnet drenched wet, my face white and terse. The inn is bolt-up and my horse is dead. Take that look off your face or on you I’ll tread. The barge is smashed up, the house did fall down. I’m leaving you now to step into town. Don’t dare follow me, I’m going right now. A farm hand I’ll be and follow the plough.

The Veil and the Wheel My strength My resolve is beyond all bounds. All Celtic curiosity Bent Concertinaed Up in my chest Crumpled  Stamped Down Hard And almost absolutely. How did I arise? Where is the horizon I wished so ardently for? Again it telescopes in and in And lands up On my doorstep The compass is redirected The true pole Magnetic North Revolves not around a distant ice-cap But burning white hot Around this man This son of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob This mirage, this distorting heat haze Scintillating around this soul Making him imperceptible, opaquely glimpsed. Indistinct As though through fog. Do we ever truly see each other? First passion is another myopia, another veil. Wrought on a loom of steel weaving a cloth of milk thistle Not easily torn in the first heat of knowing. The second is a veil of my own making A mythological veil Of Golden Fleece qualities Glistening, entrapping in its bewit...