Young Poets

Dog Days

Your lips make a clicking sound

as you pull them across your teeth.

You tune your flesh towards visitation:

your joints labour over their arrangement;

a plane of light swells shoulders,

surface for eating. Strung out

across several summers, we suffer

for our conversions, each shift of subject.

You hold ice to your ankle. I miss

my hands, busy in Greece, clutching

someone’s collar. Arrogant in strange sinew,

one version of you sits in a plastic chair,

king of all the land. Double doors open

like lips, everything like lips. In July

the temperature rises 13 degrees

and you lie sweating, all Greco-Roman.

An arrowhead’s tongue nuzzles

the vulnerability under your ribs. I eat

your leftover steak; think of the soft bones

in your ear; visit the piece of you buried

by the river, your chin a bulb of heat. I go

to bed early, wake to find three of my ribs

kicking at your door. My mildewed Eden,

all the hinges scabbed with rust. I will make you:

again, and again, and again.

x

Rat Dissection Love Poem

Its fur chemically silked, a brown like

creationism: God grinding pigment in a pestle.

A fable’s hard edge in its bone-propped

skin. I think of Victorian scientists,

callous in white coats, twitching

frogs into neon life. A prey animal’s pulse

gnaws my neck, something of a blood sport.

You turn me brutalist – a bubble of blood

at my knuckles, a weight to my hands.

Last Sunday I knelt on Victorian silk

and wished for us together like vein clutches

tendon. In chapel, you stumbled

over description of Jacob’s ladder’s

sinew-pink rungs, and blushed. I am afraid

of my ulterior motives, of the kind

right hand of God. I urge my crisis of faith

to form a ragged silhouette and billow

down the wall. I want a haunting,

the way poltergeist loves the broken

glass, for its honesty and for the sound

of light passing through it. I am good

at making martyrs. A splinter

of sun, skinned through stained glass,

congeals a hamartia at your collar.

The scalpel baptised in pink Virkon.

The head of John the Baptist on a silver platter.

The unfolding of organs. The kindness

of a sharp knife in a familiar hand.

Burial

We buried his guns in the garden

a year after he’d been burnt

in his best jumper. Rifles

and a double-eyed shotgun,

sawn barrel, heavy cartridge, no licence.

A stock that lay cold against the heat

of his cheek, felt the misting of his breath.

A trigger that knew the quick kiss of his finger,

the death-flinch. Foxes, pigeons,

rabbits, rooks, scattered

in the ringing of my grandfather’s gun.

x

He shifts his weight forward, sinks a crow,

retakes his aim. Reopens his right eye

when a kite drifts through the slaughter,

like a ghost. Shivers in the wind.

He watches till it’s flown.

x

He shot at what he shouldn’t, pushed warm bodies

deep into warrens – seagulls, racing pigeons.

He licked his lips and tasted

tobacco and liquorice. I’ve seen

his blue eyes harrowing memories,

known the affectionate touch

of his neck-wringing hands.

But he knew there was a weight in death

heavier than the fall of red feathers.

x

We pick a spot by the ditch

by the dog bones, cat bones,

grass cuttings sodden and rotting,

a ditchful of water running cold and clear,

a passing witness. I sink

his spade in the soil, funereal.

We fill in where we’ve been, leave his violence

to the ground. My mother rolls a cigarette,

watches the circling kites

while I sow grass to hide our crime.

I dread to think, she says, then stops.

x

Venus in the Forest

Below the high hill

that splits the valley wind,

night opens in the elm grove,

the wild garlic breathing.

x

Old England once, so Hardy says

scorched to the chalk,

iron fires, funerals,

smoke rising in roots–

like ghost trees waving their pale limbs.

x

We’re building a den in the forest

rotten elm boughs, slim firs

come down with a crack.

When the fires in the village

Ignite, one by one,

there I’ll cup the last of the light

in my face for him to taste.

x

I’ll give my orphan body

to the suckling ground, like water.

A vast giving love

that swells new

every season.

x

After Equinox

When the ditches burst black water,

go splashing.

Fling the old songs skyward,

chase rabbits, break their necks,

flush rooks from their nests in the flue,

black smoke writhing on the wind

bending and beating.

x

Hang the rabbits out of reach

ready for gutting, sharpen your

kindest knife.

x

The dark beats the light underground.

Driven into the landscape, a mass burial,

sunk patient and cold beneath Silbury Hill.

x

Skin the bunny rabbits,

bake a pie.

x

The first acorn, kicked by a boot,

gone rolling down the road. 

Chase it and keep it. A talisman

for the path ahead.

Make stone circles for the dead,

I let the living pass like rain.

x

Watch the slow green die to the bark –

strip the second blackberry harvest –

follow the kites as they surrender

to the turning wind like ribbons,

give up love, start fires, start walking,

up with the dawn,

waste no light.