JAMES SUTHERLAND-SMITH
POET, TRANSLATOR, CRITIC

Welcome to my website.

This is my latest collection published in November 2008.

I am now working only part time as a teacher. It is now time for me to devote myself to writing poems.

This is a new poem.



















  

  PURE MATHEMATICS



Undecidable, you’ll come to me, each garment

Slipping off, a curved line in from the cabin door,

Disordered, rumpled yet overlapping,

A novel topology of desire.



Will only the four colours of scent,

The trace of spit on the buttons of your blouse,

My touch, your throaty “Fuck me!” be sufficient

To complete the ideal map of what we’ll do?



I’ll tug or you’ll pull, no telling whose

Greater power of need will topple and fix

Both of us in perfect numbers of kisses,

6, 28, 496,



As we quiver integrating the real

With the irrational square root of two

Until you breathe irregularly and tremble

All along an endless random sequence



Of decimal places to infinity

Where your eyes close and head lolls to one side.

At sunset we’ll listen to the little river tumble

While dusk gathers and multiplies its shadows.



The river will wear away its banks in bends and loops,

A ratio of pi to a crow’s flight to the sea,

As an imaginary number picks her clothes up

And tenderly subtracts herself from me.