Saturday 17 May 2014

Fields

For Tom Clark


1.

Undo the red wool knots

It's easier if you start at the ends I say

She unravels it her way


2.

white petal stamen stained
Make a flower pile
Pink is considered

The great cylinder of rust
hums misnomers
in the working grass

Animal music bends
about the axes

The sky could be virtuous fuckless dusk
My face hole eats it

A bricked up garage door is a window

All we were taught
has a prim little swing
in the hands we left at home


3.

I'm not an Englishman today

jumpered Anglo-Saxons in situ

Odd beams are governing square faces

Broke arch in my head won't be mended
by any sort's tomorrow


4.

a cycle herd

Bees pour from
Diana's frozen skirt

while the twice struck redwood soundless croaks

a marble baby cradled -
kitsch tail on arse of Bacchus curls

The broke green stick stands
burning by the door
the white door


5.

He put the car into the back of the foreign kid
the wing mirror left swinging

Falun Gong by Trinity -
with a balancing Polish widow's hat
her gloved hands hardly moving

Town bruisers decolonize some pavement
with lager magic

history    demos    shops are    educated beauty girls    tuck the notes in

Eating lunch on green with history of birds
hid in our mouths

Herbert Spencer is the size of my thumb today

Go to dissolve


6.

Lilies sex the church
Consider them

There laid they Jesus in coloured light

the falcon the robin
the woodpecker the kingfisher
in thick yarn kneeler waves

a peeling coffin trolley

eaten walls

"Rich people had the high ceilings but
us we just bumped our crowns"


7.

Tremble, dearest cowslip flower, and shake

The drains are straight

a horse hoof sound

histrionic pylon lines
above torn fleece and threadbare rushes

Dark chocolate earth of Ely fields
where rook food is
and their sure grey mouths are insistent
bleak

Big fat daisies
are set out open
even
now


8.

Prickwillow    Soham and Burwell

Bottisham    Quy and Devil's Dyke and Wicken

heroic sky


9.

Condensing
green-ish on lazy perspex roof

rain legs

baldhead pigeon swells for no one

mere boy with mod hair
and sticking out eyes

The special kid laughs so hard
and the pencil's stumped

A slack stroke mouth asks

Cambridge that isn't shines its bruises forever and


10.

stone fingers of yore

Insect Jesus
give the pond skin

Newt drops down to murk
and then another breath

happy scarab eyes

tweed shield

I get lip buttons

I don't believe right anymore


11.

Up the stairs to Bedfordshire
my Grandma used to say

"So do you have any friends?"


12.

Skinny little daisies shut up shop
under pastel talking sky

vaulting











6 comments:

  1. Duncan,

    I'm definitely honoured.

    When my Irish Grandma (from County Westmeath) heard that I was off to live in the fens, some fifty-five years ago, she frowned and said, Well, In that case, you great fool, never come back.

    Well no she didn't say quite that, but perhaps she ought to have done.

    After all, 'twas near Ely, in same fenlands, that Oliver Cromwell, clever demolition expert, plotted the deposition of monarchy, though, as the PR staff put it about, all he was thinking about was his Prickly Pear.

    Right, and I am Queen.

    And we all know what Oliver went on to do to my grandmother's people.

    Neither she nor I should ever have forgiven his lot.

    (As you're not an Englishman today, I feel it's fair to say that.)

    But I was born a traitor to my own cause.

    "So do you have any friends?"

    "But seriously", like they used to say back in pre-school -- you've put me in mind of my first junket to Ely on a double decker Routemaster bus, one bright-to-blustery day in early September 1963. A meat pie in a pub and the cathedral...

    From the Path (for T.R.)

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  2. Shopping on the Isle of Ely and Cambridge too. The same bloody shops everywhere.

    We passed that gnarled old bastard's house but didn't go in. Ireland was the worst of his work though his betrayal of the radicals smarts too.

    The true republic has yet to happen anywhere.

    ReplyDelete