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

The Last Chapel Service

Everything is made of water says children

Passing Oundle  
Nene got swollen and bled all over

Some of the water won't move
in place (like the minister's hair)

Old women's voices mostly
sing "All that I am"
and I stop myself crying

scratch out
pretend heart

Sermon comes out on paper and flutters off

Tony does the gospel reading to be heard
with Islington traces

fenny revenge unsticking things

trembled concrete

floor warps

thin gloss
paint tears
and thin
dark etching
spider cracks

Jesus in pictures   All creatures
a donkey a cow a goose and a sheep

plain white blind remembering
stained glass     dimensionless

hardly there and wonderful

The odd brother says, "They set out
the pegs carefully for each thought".

Five feet of sellotaped canes for
orange feather duster
that is tenderness

Outside blue is more than any arrangements
going up and up and up

Dispossession

Strewn clouds    some
full    others feathered
going grey

uncoordinated
very slow
danced in

Fenland

 

These shots were taken in and around Thorney, a village in Cambridgeshire, between Christmas and the New Year.  I've visited often but couldn't say I know the place. It keeps itself foreign. 

This is where most of the sky in the country is. They've been gathering it up very quietly for some time.