David Tait’s poetry collections include Self-Portrait with The Happiness, which received an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, and The AQI, which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Prize. His poems appear in Poetry Review, Magma, The Rialto and The Guardian. In 2017 he was Poet-in-Residence for The Wordsworth Trust. He lives in Shanghai and works as a teacher trainer.
The Snowline
I miss how the fields would give way to snow,
how it seemed decided between the world
and it’s watcher the exact moment
that whiteness would grow tangible.
Then fells, bright white and endless,
as if you could bow your head across the snowline
then raise it and be covered with a crown of frost,
fat icicles dangling from your beard.
I remember a farmhouse once straddling the middle
and felt jealous at the gift they’d been given,
a front door of spring and a garden of winter.
Whenever my heart walks through the snowline
I stop to listen to the whispering trees.
And I wonder if I’ll ever make it home.
~
At Tianchi Lake
There’s a small boat rowing out
from the North Korean border
and it’s the only surface movement on the lake,
too far off by far for us to hear it
the military base over there like a cabin
that can only be accessed by a slide.
The water changes turquoise in blotches
the lake a mirror of rolling clouds
and though our viewing platform teems
with crowds there’s silence, then the mist
climbs the mountain, creeps slowly towards us.
We stay for hours as it’s all we’re here for.
We stay through the rain and through the hail.
The mist comes and goes and with it the view.
We watch a hawk hunting song birds,
we watch a tour group unfurl a banner that says:
“The Number 1 Chongqing Battery Company”.
Mostly we watch vapour –
the way it climbs the far side of the mountain
then dips towards the lake, the way tendrils of mist
skirl down to the blue like souls reaching out
for the world, the shock of being taken away too soon,
of being pushed back out to the wild sky.
~
The Panorama Trick
He’s doing that trick again with his camera –
some picture of a landscape: where he’ll appear
on both the left and right sides of the picture
laughing at our mother, or pulling a face.
To us it was first rate magic, and almost incidental
were the landscapes between faces, pine forests in
Scandinavia, suspension bridges and monuments.
How does he move so fast? Does he have a twin?
The trick, like death, was to creep up behind her,
to settle in some blind spot and wait.
My mother’s hand slowly tracked the panorama
as he chuckled behind her. He’s doing it still,
but no longer emerging on the right-hand side. Our mother
keeps panning to the right, keeps waiting for him to appear.