at the moon – all helter
skelter in the branches –
the hedgerows swithering;
then how a hare ran from
a field where cows lay
sleeping on their own
sweet muck and suckled
teats; the way you shouted
Hare! Hare! the way it came
bounding to us like you’d
pronounced it from that
landslide of dark in your
head to its dull utterance
of bone on steel on bone
that told us it was all up and
done with hare, that moon
had gulped its wide, wet-black
eye to a glitter-ball of seed.
The car panted, the hare
lay wrapped in silence
swaddled in the plaid
of branch-crossed light –
moon’s chiaroscuro – its
dying breath casting a curse
of frost across the road.
You were scared wretched
at that death, but I’ll swear
on my child’s life that a
line of hares watched us
from the brightened black
horizon, that a buck reared
and lunged and boxed
grinning in the moon as we
dragged our trophy, its
cricked neck and torn ear
and broken jaw, to lie with
the jack and wheel-brace
snow shovel, spare shoes
my father’s cuffed tweed coat.
Back home we parked
hushed the engine’s moan
fumbled open the boot and
– Christ! – that stink of hare
rank sex and blood, death’s
ether in the gunsmoke of
our breath, your hand on
my sleeve, your eyelids flinching
from the porch light’s glare.
Asleep that night, and
deep for once, I stood on
a creaking lake-wide
fantasy of ice, my veins
crystal, my knuckles
numb, hearing your breath
go round me like a saw.
The paunched hare hung
in the kitchen, its fat balls
veined and glistening; the
moon’s white petals bloomed
on window glass; a vase
of hyacinths breathed
out their early scent.
I woke to hear the bypass
hiss with scythes, remembered
how the final stook is called
the hare, how all harvest is
death and sacrifice, turned
on my back to hear a horse
cough, jackdaws shuffle
in the flue, owls shiver
needles in the Douglas fir.
I was trying to wake, to
shake off that dream, still
drifted in sleep, in sheets
of creased snow, feeling air
parch my throat, blood
tingle in my fingernails
my mind sinking on a
tilting lid of ice – and my face
blurred you said, blurred or
absent where I’d gone under
the hare’s frozen smile.
I woke wanting you, my
hands unraveling the silks
of your most hidden, most
wanton self, rousing your
blush of wakefulness
lapping your belly from the
brimful saucer of your hips
until your body seemed
to clarify and ring, to
burn mine, hot as ice
ringing its sunken bell
of purest crystal, our
lips burning, ice to ice
as we fucked away our
deaths in that obsidian
dark and hare’s beard of
blood melted to tiles
dripped a deep red O.
Then morning’s waking
in milk-thistle light, the
curtains’ gauze, the
bed’s sweet ghazal
with us in it; how you
slept, mumbling and drowsy
and quick with child in
our brittle room of glass.
I thought of the hook
the gutted hare, saw
bruises risen to your
ribs – blued iron laid
on cream skin –
remembered that blotch
of damson, the hare’s
prodigious sex, then the
sense of something
out there, out of reach
watching us and unafraid.
Carp at Meyrals
Grey-backed
bronze-finned
platinum-scaled
sculling water clouds
when sediment
scuffs up –
gills raking out
oxygen to their
chilled blood.
Aimless as thoughts
for all we know;
everything beyond
the lens of water
indifferent:
the metal bellies
of water beetles;
blue iris, mint
marjoram;
the breaking/healing
edge where air is;
a white globe curving
falling beyond
its counterweight
as dark comes;
swallows touching
down as death’s
beaked signifier.
What do they
care in which
lost tongue we try
to speak of them?
They fin an element
beyond translation
beyond difference
so unutterably.
Next
The track’s desire to be elsewhere
carries her from the soaked grass
of lawns.
When she touches currant trees, the
scent will be what she remembers:
the smell of things returned to.
Exhausted from another winter
grass spikes pasture that will
waver in late-August heat.
Too bad the house is dark, ugly;
too bad workmen are replacing
stones that will fall again
from its walls.
Even daisies lie stunned by cold;
the arrogance of buds falters, the
river chokes for air – its sputter
of white water.
Whinberries rot on heather slopes;
sloes acidify, sucking her wry
mouth dry.
The past is its own season, renewable
and lost; the track soothes her – a white
scar in the valley becoming nothing else –
unable to move, taking her into
this day, the next.
Italian Hawks
They’re lodged deep in the
cool of the church steeple, nested
behind an iron staple that binds
the wall into a kind of
faith with gravity.
Too fast to recognise at first –
wings and tails splayed for landing –
these kestrels are cinnamon and
grey, barred with black
and bold to feed.
Heat sends up its prayer; falcon
and tercel own the valley, following
the river’s ribbon of sky where
olive trees run wild from
parched terraces.
The young wait, huge-eyed
hook-beaked, all hunger and glistening
baby-down, crowding the ledge to
snap at flies, astonished
at their own reflex.
The tercel’s plumed dart
starts – M
e! Me! Me! – they pogo
at the brink in tremulous
selfishness and fear.
Something dead is tossed
to their clamour of kindling sibling
hate; they crowd the nest-hole
under the bell’s cracked
angelus of jade.
Below, the organ swells with
funeral chords, the priest intoning –
his lips tarnished with death
the faithful down on their
ruined knees.
A squadron of swifts chitters
past the hawks’ eyes, broadsiding
insect thermals, then lost
into a grey-green haze:
pure afterthought.
We watch the hawks feed
then leave, each chick boldening
stretching a wing, their claws
gripping an edge, then flesh
then sky, then bone.
They rend life and sense
from air; their breed is burgeoning
erasing history from stone
flying their ensign of
the present tense.
White Hill
All winter the white hill glowed
at the window: truth towing its
pillar of cloud; a fortress tumbled
into frozen bog. In January we
followed a scuffed trail to the
western flank, each footpad
petalled with blood. At evening
snow’s wavelength is amber
sundown pinking to strawberry
meringue. Its slopes are vellum
to scribbling hares: flat-topped
a long bone jutting at the shoulder
where rushes spike each swallow
hole. On the TV news we saw the
country chilled to monochrome
from satellites in space: England’s
cur curled into its hurt. Money markets
had failed us and politics and
war so they were the worst of
times: death-jingo words, distrust
the calculus of risk. Just now, when I
looked up from where a poem is
uncoiling, line into line, not trusting
itself to be left alone with the helix
of its language and making nothing
happen, hedges were sketched across
fields, cattle-breath scorched cooling
air, sheep scuffed out something
they’d thought better of, knee
deep in buttered snow. Now scattered
light shows all those drafts –
so much that is impossible to
say: errata, dross, each aide memoir
each billet doux, each crushed
condolence for the coming night.
Passed
The dead are with us; amongst us
I mean. You can tell them by the
cold tips of their ears, the yellow
flames that issue from their lips
instead of speech, the odd way you
still know what they mean, each one
leading us somewhere important, to
a crime scene or some other kind
of slaughter - war or marriage.
They walk slowly, stately, as if bearing
the weight of lilies; they pass right
through each other and don’t seem
to care, their pockets full of bright
untarnished change or spangles
of frost. They spend their days lost
somewhere we don’t know or ever
mention; at night they throng our
dreams under snow-tipped trees in
empty city squares that seem Eastern
European with stray trams brightly
lit like a set right out of a spy film
where others are always watching
from high buildings in unfurnished
rooms. They’re not unfriendly, the
dead, in their involuntary way; they
don’t mind much if we borrow their
stories or memories or ignore them
or even reach to touch. I find your
hand to translate from sleep instead
count your fingers like a newborn
watch the curtains breathe, rehearse
an introductory phrase I’m everlastingly
too shy to speak, seeing them turn
from me then disappear through their
smiles like sunset through last drinks
Black Crow
Black Crow you’re door-nailed now a stiff
kaput rogered dead to rights and how!
Arse-to-tit on the black stuff A truck or SUV
did for you laid you low engineered your
fall though not stiff enough to stop your mates’
croaking call Come and play They seem to
say it as if you could Black Crow but you’re
all spattered shite and blood got stuffed
in half a mo Come and pay is what they mean
They’re dining out on you even though you’re
too obscene to soar or preen prefer playing
dead incognito doggo schtum Black Crow
enough! You’re just another bum The show
has stopped cancelled aborted like your
plumage-sheen in speeding doors sexy self
admiring gleam the macho stance you blagged
the carrion you snorted took you under numb
black rubber Nicely shagged Bon chance!
Black Crow don’t blubber you’re a goner
you’re lunch your life is lopped off root and
branch and dick without prelude without
pain so quick you couldn’t muster flight or fight
Too little brain perhaps that’s understandable
an easy lapse Your breath wouldn’t mist a
looking glass for all your hard-arse hard-on
attitude Black Crow you overtook us all and
it’s death it’s death that won your heart that
knocked you flat that snatched away all kerb
side latitude that made you look so utterly
deflated superannuated a loser a gormless
twat Life’s like that Black Crow You know
it’s hard to tell one chancer from the next
What made you such a class act King of the
Undertow? More balls? Less nowse? No tact?
Tugging at hedgehog guts until a passing
shadow pulled you in fast and slick stacked
into nil’s eternal deficit where all shadows
roost and flit Black Crow it’s murder on the
hard shoulder and you’ve been here days ex
airborne litter sad bum highway trash I guess
the nights are slow lonely and long without
traffic duty or birdsong to attract/distract you
to get you through But we get along don’t we?
We get along very well Every time I cycle past
lashed in sweat I greet you with irony remorse
regret Hail Black Crow! You beauty! You
swell! You’re an institution a dark splash a
lark a legend a landmark it’s a privilege to
know No privilege can last Black Crow You’re
sadly tattered prone in the snow-white glitter
of a smashed screen battered in spilt oil fag
ends hard porn hard-core tar one feather still
frantic in the traffic stream Black Crow I know
you the way I knew a friend who used to be a
scream and then became a drag instead of gay
and then was merely in my way Black Crow this
is the end of the beginning of the road for you
What lies beyond this boundary is tough to
guess or even think or say Be brave Adventure
on alone Don’t take it hard Black Cr
ow it’s
rough luck a mantra set in stone and dropped
into the Stygian brook Black Crow this much
is true Carpe diem Que sera sera I’ll forget
you I’ll seize the day alright and seize the
night the new I’ll thumb the future’s bright lit
passing car or magic bus and hitch right out
of here Black Crow this is your pitch your
requiem quietus release your own deep shit
Death’s a bitch so just decease Black Crow
don’t look at me that way Don’t look at me ok?
Black Crow? Black Crow? Touché. Touché.
Fidelity Charm
Cradle its stasis in your hands:
plain as a pearl, its unstrung eye
snow-blind at the mind’s tundra.
Smooth and cool – an egg’s
perfection – but sterile as an ovary
masked men have sliced away.
Hold its dull orb between your knees
burnish it, peer at drifted sand where
the hours lie, and yesterdays.
It frightens you now. So fight its slick
of light on marbled stone, its golden
promise snug around your finger-bone.
French Dark
French dark is wilted light;
a dark where creatures crawl
creak, click chitinous limbs.
It’s a bat-swarm, a plague of
blood-fat mosquitoes, a fever
swamp. French dark is a sickly
treacle of the air seducing
cockroach hordes, a sticky
trickle of rats in the eaves.
It’s a gloomy inspissation
at windows where jasmine
corrupts sleep, where honey
suckle is an impenetrable