1.
The shape of the dark
when she opens her lips
on the lilac’s frilly cock of pollens
Each identity:
an allusion to the other
A furzy pubis
on the Milk and Honey
The reciprocal capture
between bee and flower
2.
It wasn’t only the orchids
masquerading as bees,
the flowers making promises
of phony nectaries,
I also thought of the wasp –
the way she’s known to hatch
her important dreams
on the caterpillar’s back.
Of course I thought of the mantis,
I thought of the cuckoo too –
still nothing helped explain
what I had done to you.
3.
A note on the petal
from the last nectar-robber –
I was here and drained the lot.
Others near and read
and reel sharply back
into the sky.
No matter, what he wrote
wears off – one flower
clothed in yellow claws
needs one full turn of Earth,
another dressed in blue
just minutes to re-self.
Eye & Sight
When I was a stay-at-home eye,
sight would often leave me
like water lifting from a lake
he mixed with other bodies.
I guessed he loved, the way clouds love,
the free and godly view
and didn’t know the more he pledged
himself to this pursuit
the more he’d fall straight back to me.
Like any eye, I sank
all his disclosures through a nerve
streaming towards the dark.
Spiny Cockle
From their metre-deep sandy resorts
the waves have raised these hard orbs:
clenched like cement hedgehogs
they wear their ribs inside out
and pricked with a white picket fence
to keep their soapdish interiors –
their lattice-gill-slither selves –
from the crunch of an oystercatcher’s kiss
or the orange fog of this starfish
that causes one cockle to buckle and let
its long pink foot slip like a leg
from the slit of its crenulated skirt:
soft pogo on which it floppy-leaps
away across the wet desert.
The Wingless Wasp
It seems that ‘one’ is fated
to be another’s ‘half’ –
what sense in this construction –
wingless cliché on a stem
waiting for her man
to lift her from her feet
because the fruit’s too high to sip –
rising between the branches
I say ‘they’ and you say ‘it’.
Worm
And like so many times before,
the worm catches the bird
by quietly and cleanly
pushing from the dirt.
Standing en pointe, the worm
attacks his yellow beak;
jabs so hard the bird’s almost
lifted from his feet.
Professional, silk-suited, she
requires just one stroke
to twist herself around
the silver hook inside his throat.
The worm, both rein and rider,
now being safely tied,
gives a final twitch
and hoists the bird into the sky.
The New World
It’s leaf-nose o’clock. The pink toes are poised.
In the dark understory, the wolf with eight legs
dines on the harlequin’s long eyes.
A whip on the floor, a whip on the limb.
The bush-master waits.
An untouchable lobster
fattens upon the leaf litter.
Some body is calling for mother, mother.
Some body munches on sphinx.
For all their splashing in the figgeries
the earless family can’t wake
the kissy sounds from sleep.
Rainforest Spelled Backwards is Lustful
Amongst the saplings and small ferns, you
can’t help but see a skirt of penises
prodding into the earth, the roots are short and
unobtrusive warts allow the tree to suck
the air is steamy and I become self-
conscious of this other body, I don’t know where to
‘look! the erotic palm tree!’ the guide announces
quietly I question if he’s made the name
up above the other trunks, the palm grows
pregnant, or so indigenous peoples are said
to believe in desire is surely to believe in
hunger leads monkeys to the topmost fronds
because the drupes are ripe one drops
like an earring among the leaves I am very small
Harvest
for Frances
After stripping the branches of berries
the robin held a handful of seeds
in her stomach: the robin carried a tree
– in fact she secretly sowed a whole forest –
a store of bows and arrows and shields.
Years found the bird had planted a battle,
her tiny body had borne the new king.
Men looked up to the skies and blessed
or blamed the planets moving overhead.
A blackbird, meanwhile, started to pick
at the fruit both armies had left.
Tended
A hot afternoon and tiredness has him
turning to the garden for fresh air
where he spills coffee and goes to swear – and swears
because she is, of course, in bed
and not about to come downstairs.
Beyond the oak, in full sun the fields
of maize grow rainbows as the tractors spray.
Beneath her curtained window, in their plot,
tended by his hands these days,
a bee is abandoning itself on his abandoned spade.
From the corner of his eye, he sees her
raise her claw as if to wave.
How long now? He blows away the steam and sips.
The struggling buzz of the bedside bell.
It no longer seems like myth: to live
like bee to blossom, blossom fruit;
within an hour of each other, leave.
Nuptials
One day, downhill from the farmer’s field,
I, a frog, married a drain,
married its cool and its damp,
web-wed its steely gills,
its shaggy walls and mind of flies:
to which the drain gave consent
silently adding its nuptials.
So overgrown with green
and happy clamminess,
on the eve of our first year
a fifth foot bulbed from my skin
with something of the pressure and shape
of a cork being eased
from a bottle of champagne.
Crickets
With this breeze
the springing crickets explore
an astronaut’s grasp of gravity. Flung
like the second half of a metaphor
I look back and there I am
and here, too
differently. Uncrossable
space between myselves.
A crowd
of moonwalkers tittering
and not one cricket
on the breeze.
Strawberry & Ship-of-War
They plucked each other out of the air
the way you might pluck any two words
and now they’ve as little between them
as a strawberry and a ship-of-war –
she asks me how to make this work,
the last six months she’s been aware
a strawberry is like a warship because
neither are similar, they’ve really
nothing to say to each other;
easier to paint the small fruit
with smaller uniforms, union jacks –
what’s tying them together except
their obliviousness concerning
the instincts which govern them,
their being aphrodisiacs.
Barnacles
Think of them now – Invincible, Endeavour
well-endowed with this swamping thatch
of teeth, this citadel of calciferic bedsits
their single occupants can never leave –
what is it about November that washes
urge into this one’s sinus-heart
eliciting his wily pipette
that with its several accordion folds
stretches beyond his stuck-fast self
to become a proboscis, a blind man’s stick
abristle with sniffing as it wavers and knocks
against his lady-neighbour’s operculum doors
only to break off like part of the rigging
the moment the mood no longer takes him.
False Limpet
Armour tailored to an elbow’s point and wrinkle, and with that same toothy colour: a False Limpet by this encyclopedia – as if it were never itself, only the imitation of something else. It’s the way you hold your mouth so tight; you’re so like someone I once met – but O, watch this slip from the rock with a splashy unclinginess.
Shadow Tale
In the tree, down the trunk,
on the curb and then running
in front of a car.
Experience has taught me
if it doesn’t work out with you,
if I don’t see you again
along comes another
I can’t tell apart.
I’m Doing You an Injustice
It’s like I’ve invited you to a party
of people I know but you don’t –
I see you fitting into the erratic
spaces between people talking
till I only see parts of you
like the nude beneath the willow
who doesn’t look quite herself
dappled by the shadowings
from what is given light first.
Succession
A gap in the trees
where a fig takes hold
and capuchin monkeys
after the fruit;
like bold picaflores
who venture for nectar,
leaf-cutter ants
for their leaves;
gold-miners flit
between heliconias,
workmen methodically
take down the trees.
Luminescent
for Sharanya
I believed I was like
the rockpool’s tuft
of ale-brown algae
that exclusively blushed
luminescent blue
when poked by that
boy with a stick
to poke a starfish –
only to find
I can, all night,
by any breath’s ripple,
perform my own borealis.
Crab
Sublittoral place in which this crab sits
like the lid of a pie, its crimped edge
rests upon a mixture of pincers, legs –
two black dactyls headline the others
dressed in the fizz and stubble of brick.
It’s these bone clothes the crab outgrows
the way song, lifting a decibel, bursts
a glass, there’s some civil upheaval
as the crab thwarts the fortlet of itself
and pauses for a minute, out-of-body,
a faded, vulnerable replica,
a soft ball of milk with milk’s film skin
soon to search for a hiding place
for the time it will take to scab over.
Significant Other
A cloud takes on the shape of a tortoise.
The tortoise can never
repay the gesture. Unashamedly,
its owner once believed that it answered
hello in its reptilian hiss
as she once believed that he, who delighted
her body, delighted her body
only. Did the creature ever think
a thought her way?
The tortoise snaps its tortoisey jaws
eating all that’s laid on
without looking up.
Examples Include Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’
The toy ring with little kitten’s face
loves the world so very much!
Child’s room, roadside, ocean floor…
decade after decade, it can’t tear itself away!
When the world comes home tired,
the toy ring with little kitten’s face
is the pink and heart-shaped post-it note,
is the bunch of petrol-station flowers
one person gives another as they imitate
the hard-wearing infatuation
of the toy ring with little kitten’s face.
Oh people in their cars and kitchens
singing of forever and always…
Really! You have to feel for them.
Are We There Yet?
So we may move beyond our park
(with its yellowed trees,
the taciturn ice cream vendor
whose flavours now seem bland)
a bridge is designed and built.
Like someone approaching
a stranger in a bar
I’m no photographer, but I can picture
me and you together,
we stride across; the rails
already bushy with brassy
locks that love the bridge that links
this part of earth with the next
Notes
The use of the phrase, ‘Significant Other’ is influenced by Donna Haraway’s discussion of ‘significant otherness’ in Notes of a Sportswriter’s Daughter and The Companion Species Manifesto.
In ‘Choosing’, the number of eight million refers to the estimated 8.7 million species currently living on Earth.
‘Say Heart’ alters a line from ‘Lying’ by Richard Wilbur.
The first line of ‘Spirit Human’ is taken from ‘The Bad Touch’ by The Bloodhound Gang.
Both italicised sections of the first poem of ‘Nectaries’ come from Isabelle Stengers’s theory of ‘reciprocal capture’ in Cosmopolitics I.
‘Spirit Human’ and ‘Rainforest Spelled Backwards is Lustful’ are written after Matthea Harvey’s style of lineation in Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form.
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the following publications in which these poems first appeared: Poetry, London Review of Books, Wild Court, PN Review, Stand, The Compass, Hotel, And Other Poems, ‘Triptych’ (Guillemot Press), Entanglements: New Ecopoetry and New Poetries VII. ‘Difficult Cup’ won The London Magazine Poetry Prize in 2015, ‘Limpet & Drill-Tongued Whelk’ won The Basil Bunting Prize in 2016 and several poems received The Girton Prize in the same year. ‘Together’, ‘Harvest’, and ‘I’m Doing You an Injustice’ appeared in the pamphlet, Dazzle Ship (Worple Press, 2014).
I am immensely grateful to the Society of Authors for an Eric Gregory Award in 2017, to the Arts Council England for a grant in 2016 and to the Hawthornden Foundation for a Fellowship in 2012. My sincere thanks to the Charles Causley Trust, Cathy Rozel Farnworth (host of the Roger and Laura Farnworth Arts Residency in partnership with the Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival) and Crackington Manor for giving me spaces
in which to write the beginnings of this collection, and to Trelex, Tambopata Research Centre and Rainforest Expeditions for giving me the opportunity to be resident poet in the Amazon.
Huge thanks and love to Phil Child, Jenna Clake, Emily Hasler, Sharanya Murali, Robert Peake, Declan Ryan, Ruth Stacey and Luke Thompson.
About the Author
ISABEL GALLEYMORE’s debut pamphlet, Dazzle Ship, was published by Worple Press in 2014. Her work has featured in magazines including Poetry, the London Review of Books and in New Poetries VII. In 2016 she was a poet-in-residence at the Tambopata Research Centre in the Amazon rainforest. In 2017 she received an Eric Gregory Award. She teaches at the University of Birmingham.
Copyright
Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by
Carcanet Press Ltd,
Alliance House, 30 Cross Street,