for Rhys
I heard you were Down South, somewhere, chipping away at stone
with cuts on your hands. Chiselling, hammering, smoothing
thought: we met a drunk in a pub, remember, who showed us
his hands – cracks and scars with blistered palms, the dirt ingrained
like seams in quartz. There’s always work for masons, he'd slurred,
lifting up his glass and knocking back the dregs. Always work,
he'd said again, standing on your toes with an emptied pint, his crooked
teeth aslant like fallen graves. I write the dates of birth and death.
Like a man trying to get his arm in a jacket sleeve, and failing, he'd swung,
and missed. Unlike you. We ran through the wet streets, with the bar staff
shouting POLICE, and the wreckage of the mason behind us.
How he'd posed on the floor like a crucifix, laughing at the ceiling.
Nicholas Hogg is the author of Show Me the Sky, nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and Tokyo, now in development as a film with Ridley Scott. Winner of the 2021 Gregory O'Donoghue Poetry Prize, and twice shortlisted for the Eric Gregory Award for young poets, his most recent work features in Magma, Ambit, and The New European.
More work by Nicholas Hogg
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