Provision

By Roy Fisher b. 1930 Roy Fisher

The irritations of comfort—

I visit as they rebuild the house

from within: whitening, straightening,

bracing the chimney-breast edges

and forcing warmth, dryness

and windows with views into

the cottage below canal-level.

For yes, there’s a canal, bringing

cold reflections almost to the door,

and beyond it the main line to Manchester,

its grid of gantries pale

against the upland and the sky;

there’s a towpath pub, where the red-

haired old landlady

brings up the beer from the cellar slowly

in a jug: there’s a chapel

next door to the cottage, set up

with a false front and a real

boiler-house, and—

rest, my mind—nearby there’s

a small haulage contractor’s yard.

Everything’s turned up here, except

a certain complete cast-iron

housefront, preserved and pinned

to a blank wall in Ottawa.

This comfort

beckons. It won’t do. It beckons.

Driving steadily through rain in

a watertight car with the wipers going.

It won’t do. It beckons.

Source: Selected Poems (Flood Editions, 2010)

Biography

British poet and jazz musician Roy Fisher was raised in Birmingham, England, and educated at Birmingham University. Describing Fisher’s exploratory, Modernist-influenced poetic style in a review of his Selected Poems for Poetry, poet Daisy Fried noted: “Sometimes prose, sometimes lineated, they are dense except when they aren’t, restless except when still, improvisational in feel inside a kind of nonce formal rigor.” Fisher . . .

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