Poems & News

Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze,
where the perfect eye of the nesting blackbird watched,
where one fern was always green.

I was standing watching you
take the pad from the gatehouse at the crossing
and reach to life a white wash off the whins.

I could see the vaccination mark
stretched on your upper arm, and smell the coal smell
of the train that comes between us, a slow goods.
wagon after wagon full of big-eyed cattle.

But your vaccination mark is on your thigh,'
an O that's healed into the bark.


Except a dryad's not a woman
you are my wounded dryad


in a mothering smell of wet
and ring-wormed chestnuts.


Our moon was small and far,
was a coin long gazed at


brilliant on the Pequod's mast
across Atlantic and Pacific waters.


Not the mud slick,
not the black weedy water
full of alder cones and pock-marked leaves.


Not the cow parsley in winter
with its old whitened shines and wrist,
its sibilance, its shaking.


Not even the tart green shade of summer
thick with butterflies
and fungus plump as a leather saddle.


No. But in a still corner,
braced to its peddle-dashed wall,
heavy, earth-drawn, all mouth and eye,
the sunflower, dreaming umber.

Catspiss smell,
the pink bloom open;
I press a leaf
of the flowering currant
on the back of your hand
for the tight slow burn
of its sticky juice
to prime your skin,
and your viens to be crossed
criss-cross with leaf-veins.
I lick my thumb
and dip it in mould,
I anoint the anointed
leaf-shape. Mould
blooms and pigments
the back of your hand
like a birthmark -
my umber one,
you are stained, stained
to perfection.