Come Here To This Gate

By Rory Waterman

Come Here to This Gate, Rory Waterman's fourth collection, is his most candid and unexpected, personal, brash, hilarious, and wide-ranging. The book is in three parts, the first a sequence about the last year of the life of his father, the poet Andrew Waterman, against a backdrop of recrimination, love and alcoholic dementia: 'your silences were trains departing'. The second consists of poems that open various gates, or are forcibly restrained behind them, from the literal North and South Korean border to the borders between friends, and those imposed by photographs, memories, and paths taken and not taken. The third opens on the poet's rural home county of Lincolnshire. He rewrites several folk tales into galloping, sometimes rambunctious ballads for the 2020s: what happens when imps, ghosts, and a boggart who looks like a 'doll left behind at Chernobyl' must reckon with the modern world and the people who lumber through it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jun 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9781800173972

Rory Waterman

Rory Waterman was born in Belfast in 1981, and grew up in Lincolnshire. He lives in Nottingham. Come Here to This Gate is his fourth collection of poems.

Book preview

9

Ainns World of Miniature Marvels

I wanted to make the short trek up Wonmisan

and rake my eyes across a miniature Seoul

to the east, its millions hidden in concrete cubes

pressed between islands of scrub – and, deep in its bowl

of ridges, Bucheon, a circuit board live in low sun.

But the forecast threatened an 90% chance of sleet

so I’m being a Titan of tired and tiny landmarks:

mildewed Twin Towers, a ten-foot-long Downing Street,

under a dry sky of greys, sad patches of blue.

That leaf could be Larry the Cat, the whine of the kid

beside me could be… Never mind. Could I rebuild home,

check in on the woman I love, nine hours back, in bed;

or see what’s become of my father, still waiting for love,

dreaming his way to the life he never made

then waking to hours of pining to go back to bed

then dreaming his way to the life he never made?

If we could still talk, Dad, I’d call, ask: do you remember

that day we took a taxi at 8 a.m.

to the foot of Mount Brandon, rose through waves of rain

a few hundred yards, gave up, came down again,

and waited like trolls beneath a metal bridge

while sheep went off around us? What else to do

all day until our driver would trundle back

with his microclimate? Then everything changed hue 10

so, slowly, we made it, past false peaks and mist filigree,

though I was eleven and you were, by then, nearly blind.

And gulping at gale on the summit, I showed you our bay,

sweeping a finger along the shrunken shore

to our pro tem home, too small for you to find.

2020

11

I.

ALL BUT FORGOTTEN

December 2020—January 2022

Loved. You can’t use it in the past tense.

Ken Kesey

The past, like a severed limb, tried to fix itself onto the body of the present.

Hisham Matar 12

13

Prelude

I see him rounding the hairpin to Spring Hill,

whiskey legs slow down the tightest coil of pavement,

pipe clamped in smiled-thin lips, my hand in his –

the hand that prodded his a month ago,

that couldn’t uncoil the fingers now pared to ash

and boxed in my boot, with nowhere else to go.

But still we dawdle down Spring Hill, don’t we?

Me tethering him those final yards, knowing

none of what a toddler can’t know, and happy.

1985 / 2022

14

i. The Shortest Day, Intwood Ward

She walks me briskly past a row of ‘bays’:

alcoves in which a body lies contorted

in each peaceable corner. Out here is chaos.

We stop at bay 5 – ‘You’ll know which one he is’ –

then she gestures, smiles, pads off somewhere else.

And do I? Then I do. ‘Hi Dad’, I say,

so he judders, heaves his chin up from his chest,

beams. ‘Hello, son!’ His face is not