Reading The Light, by Ross Thompson

Reading The Light

by Ross Thompson

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1.	Ghost Channels 01:18	lyrics	buy track
A small, inky and intense child, he loved to discover unheard melodies and textures squirrelled in the shadows...
2.	Pest House 01:05	info	buy track
3.	Magic Bullet 02:46		buy track
4.	Returns 01:42	info	buy track
5.	I'm On Fire 01:03		buy track
6.	Delayed Pleasure 01:40	info	buy track
7.	Prodigal 02:03	lyrics	buy track
Remember when the races came your way. They ruled out elliptic tracks and shipped in a rig of lights, cameras and presenters in corduroy blazers who cared not one fig for a minor heat in a hidebound town. Not even a barefoot Zola Budd piqued their interest as they broadcast the relays, sprints and hurdles. But the crowds came in droves, filling out the park, spilling up steep, lush banks on tartan picnic rugs, riding clouds of daisies and dandelions, and guzzling Tayto cheese and onion with torpedo flasks of Campbell’s condensed tomato soup. You bored, and toddled off into the thick of an undulating throng of giants dressed in nylon tanktops and Crimplene slacks. The announcer’s voice boomed like canned thunder while you spied on two lovers flattening the grass beneath the quivering branches of a horse chestnut tree, and then bothered a curled up hedgehog. You grew bored again, and returned to where you thought was the spot where your family should be but could not see past a tapestry of bellies, knees and elbows sweeping side to side. A tide of panic, growing frantic, surged inside your ears as cheer after cheer swept over the verge of where you stood, twenty years and two thousand miles from where you set out. It took all of your strength to fight your way back to your family, who were too lost in the races to notice you were gone.
8.	Domino Day 03:12		buy track
9.	Drinking Cokes And Eating Mac Cheese In The Tower Cafe 01:35	info	buy track
10.	Cut 04:55	lyrics	buy track
When the power went out with a finger click, the whole of North Down went black and quiet as a lake at midnight. Syrupy dim flooded out of shadowed nooks and crannies, filling from the floorboards up with murky tenebrosity, sending you scrabbling for candles, oil lanterns and portable halogen torches: a glowing timeline of ingenuity to pacify your yelping daughter, afraid of the dark lest it contained snakes or men made from teeth...
11.	Cigarette Girl 01:24		buy track
12.	Olympia Splendid '66 01:28	info	buy track
13.	The Wild Hunt 01:57	info	buy track
14.	Threading The Light 01:12	lyrics	buy track
It took thirty-six hours to bring you home though it may have been more, and it may have been less; a day and a half in the eye of the storm of laughing gas and sheets scented with lemon zest. Something was wrong from the off: a lost wedding ring, a snippety shift nurse, several botched epidurals and an afternoon spent watching your stuttering heartbeat playing hopscotch on a fuzzy screen. I split my time between fetching naff sandwiches from the hospital canteen and telling your mum everything would be alright when all I wanted to do was thread first light into your eyes, and slap first breath into your chest, but the timing was so tight, and the space in the cleft so slight that I nearly forgot, and I nearly lost faith but nothing is ever truly lost; it is only misplaced.
15.	Altiplano, 1958 01:39		buy track
16.	The Daily Crossword 01:43	lyrics	buy track
The letters are no longer placed inside the boxes. They were once bang on target: neat bullet holes all dead straight in a line; each answer correct and proudly square set. Her hand was once firm but her words now squirm. A tremor has become her signature. The crossword has changed. The spaces that yearn to be filled now yield to a silent cure. Somehow we muddle through. I read the clues, and do my best job of trying to jog her faltering memory. We both choose to ignore the fact that she has been robbed of her keenest skill. Between rounds of pills and the next day’s meal order she replies – oh, the surprise, when she knows d’Urberville, Analogue or Shinto, as if her eyes still hold the light like a lamp glimpsed through mist. More often than not, the right words are lost, her eyes start to drift, and my kindest gift is to complete the rows down and across and say, “That’s right,” as if this can make up for the countless books bought when I was ill, the countless answers taught when I got stuck, and all the other gaps she helped to fill.
17.	The Switch 01:45	lyrics	buy track
When I lost you, something fell loose, came unfixed: the thread that sewed me together unpicked and unstitched...
18.	Sorrow 02:21		buy track
19.	Ardens Sed Virens 01:56	lyrics	buy track
The magic hour between his weekly bath and bedtime, bare feet poking from under cherry apple Flash Gordon pyjamas toasty fresh from the hot press, he tiptoes across spongy shag pile, past half-open doors of the hallowed “good room” and the snug...
20.	On Castlerock Beach 02:17	info	buy track

about

A collection of readings from my debut collection Threading The Light alongside a selection of newer poems and works in progress.

Threading The Light was published by Dedalus Press in October 2019.

www.dedaluspress.com/product/threading-the-light/

The book itself comes wrapped in a gorgeous cover by the painter Craig Jefferson.

www.craigjefferson.com

Many thanks to every person who has supported, encouraged, endorsed or responded to my writing. I am most grateful.

Particular thanks to Pat Boran for his kindness, mentorship and chiefly for taking a chance on publishing my work. Thanks also to Mel McMahon, Maria McManus and Nessa O'Mahony for so generously helping me to launch the collection, all of whom are very talented poets in their own right.

credits

released October 20, 2020

All poems copyright Ross Thompson 2020.

Recorded entirely at home in the small hours when the house was quiet and the world was still.

Tracks 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 20 originally published in Threading The Light (Dedalus Press).