Rock of Juno
1.
The piazza by night, spotlights
on S. Nicolo di Bari, braziers,
a football chased through the village
by its inheritors. Pressed to eat
off a plastic plate. Time immemorial.
2.
Scent of the white flowers, scented
of sperm, heavy with night.
3.
Impossible to reckon the sum of sleep
in the scarp forests falling, but
recall the bark of a boar.
4.
Nights, the shadow of your ankle
withers in its shackle. You might
take on the world. Marco! Marco!
5.
Sojourns that are only so many
pages of notebooks, yet a life-
time. Memory of girls swinging
their singing heads pushes your
blood through. Is it Giulia? Luisa!
6.
Martins by day, moths by night:
thesis on flight. Ryanair.
7.
Women in nylon, men with their
pale blue shirts; the fountain running.
8.
Shadow that prowled the perimeter
makes a sudden night of it. Subito, subito.
9.
Panic as vertigo on the verge of time.
10.
To sit in the lovely
machine of the walking body,
done for the day.
11.
Yes, and you crossed the world
for this, and the valley, down which
the river over its own white cobbles.
12.
After the shouted festival, the gas
lamps and electric stars, recurrent
insects, sheer mass of beetle.
13.
And the girls are singing along,
and the beetles to your bones,
and have endured the poem.
P. Q. R. Anderson
P. Q. R. Anderson has published four volumes, Litany Bird, Foundling's Island, a long poem In a Free State: A Music (“Destined to be a landmark in South African poetry” – J.M. Coetzee), and Night Transit (Dryad). He is the recipient of South Africa’s Thomas Pringle Prize for Poetry (2018) and the Sanlam Literary Award (2006), and was runner-up in the Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize of Canberra University in 2017, judged by Simon Armitage, and in The Rialto/RSPB “Nature and Place” competition in 2020, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024. He teaches English at the University of Cape Town. His work has appeared in The London Magazine, Denver Quarterly, TEXT, The Rialto, New Contrast, New Coin, Stanzas, The Hopkins Review, Blue Earth Review, Rougarou, Tears in the Fence, and other magazines.
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