Four poems by David Cooke

Washing

Home again each month like a stranger,
he has three days’ turnaround
between trips for you to wash
his gear – which leaves you
barely two when, on his final day,
you’d rinse off his luck.

So let him mooch with mates,
while you heat the copper and soak
his long johns, socks and ganseys
in that soup of frothing water,
teasing fibres matted
with blood, scales, spatter.

And when you’ve sluiced
and sluiced the greasy suds away,
lift the dripping weight of wool
that you will wring to dankness
and then force down
your mangle’s tight-lipped throat.

If weather’s bad, God help us!
as once again you pray for days
of providential breezes –
for though he never says,
you know he’ll love that freshness:
its yielding warmth, its laundered smell.

Bringing Word

I wonder what she calls it –
this unencumbered space
where she receives her visitor.

The best room? The parlour?
It’s too confined and shipshape
to ever be her lounge.

Slumped in an armchair,
she barely hears the details
that swirl like flotsam

around her swimming head,
her sideboard and the wireless
adrift like loosened freight.

In the years to come
she will tune in
through silences,

the static, to a roll call
of mythical names,
each one a watery district

reached by men
who may return or not,
and never leave a footprint.

Braider

Each day she views the world
through a puzzle of knots
and meshes. Inured to work

and harsh fibre,
she has toughened her hands
in meths and urine –

for softer hands
would blister and burn,
lacking the strength

her skill imparts
to labyrinthine cordage.
Cast on the water,

it’s delicate
and seems a thing
composed of air –

sinking only
because it’s weighted.
Hauled in, it tenses

against itself
and the flexing
load it gathers.

When the seas
have emptied
she will make a net

that serves no purpose.
As ornamental
as a tapestry,

it will speak
of the days she’s spent
stooped and aching.

In the Hold

The first time you went below
you couldn’t hear or think
of a thing: not even

your fear of slicing
a finger which in the cold
you might not notice.

And having lost
their rag with words,
reduced in all the din

to senseless
mouthings, the older hands
spat curses, damning

youth’s cack-handedness;
a rooky’s lack of speed,
then showed you

once again
how to slit a belly
and scrape out its slops

with a tidy
off hand flourish.
Given time you’d

get the knack
as others had
before you –

the cloudless eyes
staring back
from layered beds of ice.

David Cooke won a Gregory Award in 1977 and published his first collection, Brueghel’s Dancers in 1984. His retrospective collection, In the Distance, was published in 2011 by Night Publishing and a collection of more recent pieces, Work Horses, was published in 2012 by Ward Wood Publishing. His poems, translations and reviews have appeared widely in journals including Agenda, Ambit, The Irish Press, The London Magazine, Magma, The North, Other Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London and Stand.

The poems above are inspired by various aspects of the Grimsby fishing industry.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter.
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