Hill, Selima

England, (b. 1945)

Please Can I Have a Man

Please can I have a man who wears corduroy.
Please can I have a man
who knows the names of 100 different roses;
who doesn’t mind my absent-minded rabbits
wandering in and out
as if they own the place,
who makes me creamy curries from fresh lemon-grass,
who walks like Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle;
who sticks all my carefully-selected postcards –
sent from exotic cities
he doesn’t expect to come with me to,
but would if I asked, which I will do –
with nobody else’s, up on his bedroom wall,
starting with Ivy, the Famous Diving Pig,
whose picture, in action, I bought ten copies of;
who talks like Belmondo too, with lips as smooth
and tightly-packed as chocolate-coated
(melting chocolate) peony buds;
who knows that piling himself stubbornly on top of me
like a duvet stuffed with library books and shopping-bags
is all too easy: please can I have a man
who is not prepared to do that.
Who is not prepared to say I’m ‘pretty’ either.
Who, when I come trotting in from the bathroom
like a squealing freshly-scrubbed piglet
that likes nothing better than a binge
of being affectionate and undisciplined and uncomplicated,
opens his arms like a trough for me to dive into.

Brueghel’s Helicopter

The trees are white,
the hunters have gone home,
and even the skaters on the distant ponds
have fallen silent in the swirling snow.
The little pig has trotted back inside
and settled sweetly in my arms again;
and as it sleeps, its chin against my chest,
the bewildering adventures of the morning
come rushing back in all their vividness—
the way the mules flickered in the moonlight;
the glimmer of the cockpit in the rocks;
and finally the shock of seeing the pilot,
his chin against the window like white meat.
As dusk, then darkness, fall, and rumours spread,
people start to gather at the inn.
I hear the muffled crunch of their boots,
and then the stamps, as they approach the porch.
The men look cold,
their skinny dogs fed-up.
The only comfort I can offer’s tea,
brewed by burning tables and dried flowers.
The piglet in my arms is fast asleep;
and one by one, as dawn breaks with no news,
each man returns for solace to his dreams:
I watch the snow, and dream of San Diego,
sizzling in the sun, and full of schnapps.

The Postman Like a Bunch of Flowers

The women on the quay call him Crocodile
and shower him with stones and bits of glass.
They ought to call him something nice like Flowers.
He doesn’t even eat the local fish.
Far less meat. Far less other people.
He’s much too busy caring for the fruit
whose strange imported colours block the highway—
their wild reds, their toxic-looking purples,
their pinks and blues, like little tensed-up babies
he dreams at night of taking in his arms
and rocking in a light but steady rhythm
until they fall, or drift, into a trance,
like furless pigs that loll about in barns
with eyelashes so white they are excused
any kind of action except sleep.

About the Poet:

Selima Hill, (b. 1945) is a British poet, born in Hampstead into a family of painters and writers. She read Moral Sciences at Cambridge University, married a painter, and had a family, before publishing her first collection in 1983.

Selima lives by the sea in Dorset where she divides her time working on a ninth collection, Suitcase; editing an anthology of dog poems; teaching for the Poetry School and the Poetry Library in London; working on the libretto for a multi-media project about bees; and chasing after her chickens and small grandchildren.

Awards include Cholmondeley Award for Literature, Whitbread Poetry Award, University of East Anglia Writing Fellowship.

Collections include Trembling Hearts in the Bodies of Dogs, Violet, Bunny and Portrait of My Lover as a Horse. [DES-08/19]

Additional information:

About Selima Hill from the Poetry Archive
Selima Hill – Bio at the British Council, The United Kingdom’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities.
Selima Hill at her Publisher, BLOODAXE BOOKS LTD., Eastburn, South Park, Hexham, Northumberland NE46 1BS, UK