


I notice it every time,
one hand stuck on FAIR
through winter, summer.
George III, M. Woller,
Vernier scale, detachable
hygrometer.
Silent moon face
in the corridor,
glanced at, tapped,
should blink
and elegantly explain
the weather in the window,
but the mercury,
once liquid in its
tall, thin tube,
is black and stuck,
insisting climate
does not change.
I’ll get it fixed,
I like to know
what’s happening,
turn the wheel
so one hand marks
where the level rests
beneath earth’s tidal air,
full of swift, quicksilver
shoals this afternoon.
Tomorrow it will recall
where we were,
and its companion
tugged by a thread will say
if we slid down or
climbed up from yesterday.
© Chris Hardy
Picture 10108477, illustration in a Civil Service Stores catalogue, 1926, image copyright Mary Evans
Chris Hardy has travelled widely and now lives in London. His poems have been published in Stand; Tears in the Fence; The Dark Horse; The Interpreter’s House; The North; The Rialto; ink sweat and tears, the compass magazine and many other places. He is in LiTTLe MACHiNe (described by Carol Ann Duffy as ‘The most brilliant music and poetry band in the world’), performing their settings of well-known poems at literary events in the UK and abroad. His fourth collection, Sunshine at the end of the world, was published by Indigo Dreams Publications in 2017. Roger McGough said about the book: ‘A guitarist as well as a poet Chris Hardy consistently hits the right note, never hits a false note’ and Peter Kennedy, in London Grip says, ’Chris writes vivid, expository poetry often heavy with portent and mystery. Each of these poems is a story as beautifully muscular and slippery as an eel’. Chris writes: ‘I have an old barometer that my grandad used to look at and tap every day. It is very old and when it was passed to me I decided to get it fixed. That is what the poem is, partly, about.’