First frost, late

First frost, late

The winter when it

comes brings frozen flames

and glow borrowed from the needle

strewn floor

The sloes have gone

bruised, lost,

chalky skin darkening at a rubbing thumb

and before them the blackberries

and the hairy hips and the hawthorn

It will be months now

before I can find things in hedges

The other day there were mushrooms

but they weren’t quite right

Nothing happens

Trees still have

their leaves and the air

its fug

But the frost crunches in the morning

and the sky is huge and slate grey

or else bright

bright blue

at night there are

some stars

What is nice / To the distant shore

What is nice

I took the wood off the compost heap.

It was too big so I cut it up with the good saw.

It was wet,

some bits frozen a few

rings in

So I split some of the smaller bits and

laid them on the hot coals, glowing orange

and translucent

so that they would burn and

the bigger logs could dry on top.

With the waiting logs I made a pile,

watched them whistle and spit, snap

like home,

where my hair and my

skin smell of smoke.

He had drunk too much to walk straight.

It doesn’t matter

all his life he has walked me straight.

The axe sparked where it hit the stone ground.

What is nice is when you don’t have to understand. 

Winter 2010

To the distant shore

To the distant shore there was a light flooding it came on ships with bright green sails
I saw you up in the mountains where the wild pigs snuffle and
ruck up the dawn’s damp mud
and the streams swell with rain water

I had been in those places before
they swum up like slow grey fish from the back of my brain, rippling the surface so gently I
could barely tell, but could see the colour ring out like a drunk radio wave
It flickered my eyelid
To see the clouds shadows on the scrub mountains
To see the shafts that break through them, and mirror the emeralds in the grass.
The smoke from those houses dwindled upwards from the bottom of the valley to the top,
fingers raised to the sky, which raised back, shrugged off by the mountains like a scarf, so
that there was a gap between them, which gave the mountains a dark glow,
thudding like a headache on the skyline.

I was in the oven of the earth, trembling as a plague for lack of sleep

I can see the lines they are sediment on a hill's side
They are the hillside, millions of years
"this one is the dream of the rocks” 
Teach me the times I have missed 
staggering through blank faces and screwed tight nighttimes, desperate with silence

One day I will make you a thing it will bring tears to the eyes of the world and swell like a tumour in the brain of time.

It was an old country, the roads wouldn’t take you anywhere
no matter how many times you tried
they just led round in smaller and wider loops.

Badger / The Green Bird

Badger

He’s there, by the side of the road,

head facing away from it, in

the direction he was going

His chin rests on the edge of the ditch

nestled in nettles,

just covering his right eye

but I can see it’s closed

the closest thing we have

to a bear

muscular, low to the ground,

neck lost in powerful shoulders

feet smaller than you would expect

No sign of any major injury

little blood,

which means

he probably died from a broken leg,

a glancing blow

to the side of his solemn head,

which gradually the flies

came and buzzed around,

sensing the end

sensing death, his eye

swirling in mute panic, or maybe 

still

and black back breathing

up and down, calm and resigned.

Around, the houses

sit smugly at the end of

long white fenced gravel paths, splayed

on the fields like crusted cow shit.

The thick fluttering of a flag

and a bright white face

at a narrow window.   

October 2011

The Green Bird 

There was a small bird, green,

and the apple tree was his favourite.
He sat all chest and feet
on the branch like a tear in a page.

The apples changed and grew,
they fell and moulded
And we gathered the elderflower
to make you a potion to lift your heart

I don’t know if the green bird watched us
but once we had skeletoned
the tree of its flower he flew,
and it was beginning to get dark.


Late Summer 2009

The Kill / Hiding / A stage

The Kill

Black teeth and wires

dead wood ripped from grey scrabbling earth

the thighs and the root ends

sprawling veins still damp

and humming.

He cut a path through the field, dragging

the beast behind him,

its open eye white

and unseen in the dark save by the scatting arc

of the dangled torch

breathless and nervy in my sweaty

cold palm.

Limbs stiff and bouncing,

hopping over rivets and ploughscars

whooping and bleeding no stars

came to us, tripping on pebbles

and pumpkin creepers.

Tugged fur came off in clumps at the rasp

of clutching hands

And his head

shaved and drawn,

faced forward, brow breaking the air’s

waves to the fire

that burned up hooves and hairs

and drew in the night around it.  

 

Hiding

Sleep soundly like a

crab, all in a space

of rocks

and a drip of water

all spiny shell safe and

egg shell white, wet sand.

Only the calls catch the wind

The towers, the lighthouses.

A stage

Everything seems cut out,

in layers, falling neatly behind
the last,
slotted into the earth

Here is where the house
ends
Here is where the trees

begin
Here is where the trees
end

Truffle hunting / He wrote his name / I remember when the lake froze / The Black Bear

Truffle hunting

they had tied bells to the dogs' necks

they ran like a grotto over the slope, flicked in and out of the tall pines

that are misted in the morning

sometimes you could swear the mountain was a cloud and that the cloud could be breathed away

but no. the hounds chased through the trunks

determined against the cold, although spindly.

I could not see the man.

in that place the boars dig with their noses and the people are lost
and you are.  

Winter 2008/9

He wrote his name

In the dust, he wrote his name
but water could not hold it
so he took the bark from an old oak tree
that was cracked and carved
as rocks by magma
or an old man's tongue
and slept the night in the dust
where names were finger traced
in the safe place, where only

the cuckoo spit that fell on his face 

in the morning could bother him

I remember when the lake froze

I remember when the lake froze
and we rushed
to skid around on the
ice
we jumped and jumped on it
to make it
crack
but it never did
that lake must have been
frozen deep deep down
probably for miles
and miles

I remember the bits
of things stuck
in the ice
leaves, twigs
half in
half out

The Black Bear

The idea of the Bear unnerves me

silent and huge, ash and fur and
red eyeball looking.

Upright, like a man standing
paws leather and ready, hung
shadows on padding gloom
over the floorboards.

Hollow bone, echoing
like a horses gurn
waiting at the top of the stairs.

It is wrapped in the sheets and breathing
waiting unmoving and unbending is the Black Bear

Not like the stars
not flicking between the trees, not hiding

not concealed
a speckle on an oak leaf.

It is in the clearing
unheard, felt like a lift in your stomach, a stone
on the nape of your neck
waiting in the kitchen with the peelers and the forks.

Behind you, on all fours
slit shaped nostrils
looking up.

Frost / Almighty glow-worm / We came back

Frost

There was frost on the ground this morning

when first  I woke

and was confronted by the day

Everywhere was clothed

in a layer of white

that clung to the fibres

of the earth

cloaking, suffocating

protecting

it was clean

and the grass shivered.

Then I slept again

and dreamt

And when I woke the frost was gone

Winter 2006/7

Almighty glow-worm

Almighty glow-worm,

I have seen soft trod

soles rippling grass on the hillside

and tank tracks

in the frozen mud filled

with sewage

Almighty glow-worm

I have seen bomb blasted

buildings like stacks of wafer

and all the while

the prayer song of

a hundred million minds abounds

Almighty glow-worm

I have felt time like spiders

claws on my shoulders, bristling

my neck

men moving mountains

in and out of market archways

and phantom housed cavities

of faces at every turn

I have seen a city

with death in its every step

and I have felt far from them

for they are nothing but walking

inevitabilities that shift themselves

around like sand in nothing

but an impression of what it is

to be alive, all mighty glow worm

I have seen above the walls

around my forest and I have

climbed up high in the cedars

and the story trees

and tasted the chill air

and there has been a wake in front

of me a gentle sea beast breathing

up and down 

and I have walked out

across the hills to meet it,

across the humming grass,

but when I reached it

it was not there

and from the tress the loudspeakers

sang out one and a half thousand years

of nothing but an impression

of what it is

to be alive 

Cairo? Early 2008

We came back

Then we came back

And it was as if we were never gone

We met up like lines on an etch-a sketch

and it flowed like a river

There were all the same old things

the same sounds and smells

and silences

it was like the whole thing had never happened

but I still find sand in my pockets

and in my eyes in the morning

you woke me

held me in your arms and

carried me through the darkness of the garden

swaddled me in the warmth

of the night-time sky

in the daylight places when they are

left to themselves

At first I wouldn’t come

but you picked me up and brothe

the dreams from my brow

lifted the midnight sack from my small face

and showed me

the sky torn apart

like orange peel,

like cracking paint

like icy puddles

behind it there were war colours

dawn colours

When we came back, like pieces of string.