Patrick Errington

Two poems from Patrick Errington’s Second Hand
followed by a note on the author

Leaving Alexandria

They told me as a child to be exact with pain.
Nurse it, they’d instruct, in the swaddling folds

of your brain, in the clay. Let it seed and shiver
out, vein you, plot the skin like an empire

blushes a schoolroom map. I’d not listen. But I have
so much of Alexandria in me, my body, an atlas

cedar at the core, bright as ribbon lightning, little
leafed, or bare, or budding. They have their voices, still,

but no breath, their mouths now forgetting, songbirds
for teeth. Listen. I’m mining down beneath my ribs,

scarring for that scar I stem from. I can so nearly feel it,
a lost city, and a wild of cedar gathered about my skin.

I will make this the new mouth of me. Grackles, soon
will shiver along my lips. I have so much to tell you.

Patrick Errington

They Don’t Make Gods for Non-Believers

When I tell him I’m dying, my doctor says I’ll die
years and years from now if I’m careful, so I will

die, then, I say, but carefully. After all, if it’s worth
doing then it’s got to be worth doing carefully

and my doctor agrees (he should). All the same
you can be too careful, which is why I see him far less

than is, quote-unquote, prudent. My doctor, I mean, not
God. Him, I see so much more than should a devout

non-believer. But never where I expect to – great
storms, great losses and the like. Rather in the pale

residues left behind latex gloves, or the soft patience
of a painkiller. Maybe it’s a sign I’m approaching

the end. Or it may just be the perfunctory depression
of my tongue again, the requisite ah. Ah, as though

comprehending. But let’s face it, comprehension’s
not the issue. I mean, I can comprehend, like glass,

that light, with all its grit and sine, comes apart
into colour, but that hardly warms this halogen, hardly

amounts to understanding. My doctor thinks his is
a look of understanding, with all that plastic wisdom

of sign and symptom, but understanding nothing
of mine. Between you, me, and my god, my God

I’ve got a lot to cower from. Which, I guess, means
I should put faith in one of us. But Him I don’t trust

any more than my doctor, or me, or any more
than anyone else so reliant on terror in their acolytes,

shivering and braille-skinned, deaths confessed to
and calendared. He laughs at my swithering, hands

swaddled in the too-white light, reading my body,
asking who I’ll speak to while I write this, kneeling,

pages closing more quietly than hands on the bed.

Patrick Errington

Patrick James Errington is a poet and translator from the prairies of Alberta, Canada. Winner of several international competitions, his poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2016, The Iowa Review, The London Magazine, The American Literary Review, Diagram, The Adroit Journal, Horsethief, and West Branch. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA programme, Patrick currently lives in Scotland, where he is a PhD researcher at the University of St Andrews.

Leaving Alexandria first appeared in West Branch. They Don’t Make Gods for Non-Believers first appeared in The London Magazine.