Tess Jolly

madeira drive

Something leads us back along the cliffs
towards the scalloped arch of spandrels and quatrefoils
knotted with spindle and berries,
the arcade that echoes with ghosts washed up
from the carnivals and rallies of the past,
the aquarium where years ago our children stared
at silent lifeforms drifting, vast grey underbellies
so pale against the glass they turned away.
Further still, boarded up, its walls papered
with flyers of old events, the Concorde 2
where we once thronged in ultraviolet to the bass:
pressed at dawn by the love and shove of bodies
onto a beach lit by fires, we swayed arm in arm
along this coastline, vowing not to make
the same mistakes we thought our parents had,
refusing to think it all might end.
The sun flares, a flame guttering out, and we agree
to head home; but first we’ll feast on cockles,
their salty, gritty forms both moreish and appalling,
listening to the water shape the stones.

the cello and the nightingale

And what if the call that answered the cellist 
from the woods behind her garden     

turned out to be a hoax — not the nightingale  
she claimed had echoed the notes

but a bird-song imitator, expert siffleur,
and what if there were those among 

the millions of astonished listeners 
who knew a nightingale would have startled

as the recording crew tramped through the bushes,
but chose to believe in the exquisite duet?  

Tonight, I’ll go along with the well-rehearsed
trick of your voice on the phone     

reassuring me you’re feeling much better,  
that the new medication seems to be working,     

though I can hear in your clipped repertoire 
signs you’re retreating into the thicket,   

terrified by the figures and noise   
tearing through the dark towards you.

Tess Jolly has published two pamphlets: ‘Touchpapers’ (Eyewear) and ‘Thus the Blue Hour Comes’ (Indigo Dreams). Her first full collection, Breakfast at the Origami Café, was published in 2020 by Blue Diode Press. She lives with her family on the south coast of the UK, where she runs her freelance editing business: www.poemsandproofs.co.uk.

Tess wrote the following about ‘Madeira Drive’:

After I read Sarah Howe’s poem, ‘Crossing from Guangdong’, its opening line, ‘Something sets us looking for a place’, echoed in my mind. I was thinking about this poem — its themes of travel, real or imagined, the paths we take and the paths our parents took and how these overlap and interlay — as I walked with my family in a place that had been familiar stomping ground many years before, thinking about the different ways in which the place and the visitor(s) had changed.

And this about ‘The Cello and the Nightingale’:

Inspired by the story of Beatrice Harrison, the poem considers the idea that there are realities we communicate to each other and collectively choose to go along with when the one we want to believe in feels unreachable. Harrison’s story led me to think about conversations where there seems to be an unspoken agreement to accept the trickery of not being real with each other even though both speakers know what lies beneath, because it feels more desirable and less daunting than the alternative.