Five Poems

David Hawkins

Corvine

Jackdaws’ voices slowed down
are the sound of slate moving over slate
the slide of shale and scree
scraped together in a steep-sided valley.

These are the black dots
joining crag to crag, holes punched
in mist, picking the outlines of hills
like dreams of whales rising, waterfalls
spuming their white ropes up the cliff.

The raven crows over then,
its one gutteral echoing
in the book folds of stone,
swallowing them
in the loud swing of its wings;
on a different timescale.

Here is a rune vocabulary
so easy to memorize,
even easier to forget.

We recognize it from below,
hold its dark flame a moment,
then let it be the one
to let go of us. Always,
the stream’s tremendous rush,
the tap left on,
the plugholing feather.

 

Faith (Pants)

I said ‘there’s no chance you’ll get anything back.’
But you wrapped a blue pair and sent them.

The chain-letter of knickers carried on
without us watching, mysterious packages
loosed on the globe in elliptical orbits.
‘It’s just a bit of fun – I reckon it’ll work.’

‘Nah.’

But the first pair appeared quite soon.
Black and lacy with thin pink ribbons,
you tried them on: they seemed real,
if ornate. You tried them off. Delicate.

That night the moon fizzed high ice-clouds,
evensong crept back into the sheet music,
black cats disappeared into stick-on cartoon holes.

There was a long pause.
Silence from the secret pant-giving world.
Then one day, after we’d forgotten,
the second pair arrived: stripy, relaxed,
more suitable for general use.
‘I like them actually, I think I’m gonna wear them.’
As there were no particulars
who the sender was we’ll never know.

Nothing else after that: the chain had outgrown you,
forked/ doubled, finally broken. Unlinked.

 

Thetis

A handsome goddess, forgotten,
overlooked, you might have been
creator of the universe,
celebrated in one extant early hymn,
a fragment that won’t hold up.
You were lost somewhere
in time’s puppet-show;
a white glove would finger
dust off your name.

Sea-dazed,
it’s clear you’ve crawled out,
become
a silverfish, even-toned,
articulated and glistening
after your third moult,

eating the grouting,
toeing the line where fixed things
hang together, with your delicate silver feet
placed carefully,

always on a constitutional.
Three tails mean you’re cousin of the mayfly:
so cough up ephemera,
admit plasticity. ‘At least 300 million years’
laundered through your shell.

I found you in a typo,
then read up on Wikipedia.
Anything spun like this
is more a footnote to
a footnote to a footnote
than godlike; a sneeze arriving.
An invented memory,
with you silvering between the lines
like a banknote’s metallic thread,
a slug’s brittle next-day trail,
the milky way.

 

Coming Up

                              The pause
before the pause.

Ritual-free (thankfully),
just foreshortened reflections
in fragments of mirrors,
jokes about the credit crunch,
then a crash-zoom close-up:
mucus membranes
   dilation
        pulse-trip, eu-
            -phoria;
so
much
love. Mate.

The annotations on the back of your hand
loosen, fly
to the corners of the room,
hang there, obscure
as bats in the daytime,
retracing their dreams thinly.

Music focuses, tightens,
bulges with intricate
simplicity, synaesthetically
communicates its need for a drink.
A cigarette like having a swim.

Vicarious: a trick game
of false hands under desks,
of rubbing each others noses.
Someone. is touching. you.
in another room, just like this
in another house, in another
city, world, universe, using
the childish form of address.

Sunlight begins to dilute
the dancing particles,
atoms of love in us.

Like the judder of slight turbulence
the sinking lift of the plane
leaning on space, feeling
for the troposphere, measuring
parabolas, ululating air
through opening doors, finding
the gradual lurch of nothing. Just
                               the pause
after the pause.

 

Polecat

On a blink of road
we catch it in our headlights, unhesitant.
Its eyes, lit orange for the brief
recognition, are two small hells.
The pelt is a metallic shiver
dragging air closed behind,
before it dives back into the hedge-world
on the other side.
No splash, no ripple.

To follow would be a face full of thorns
and a long traipse through acrimonious shadows.
Whatever your opinion
don’t stop the car.

Feisty in its burrow
a polecat squeezes red ink
from the heart of your favourite cock,
the third in a lineage
scrummed and plucked,
by one of these ‘little fuckers,
not even good for a scarf.’
The answer to a question
you never want to ask,

always dodging the trap’s
pranged parenthesis.

 

DAVID HAWKINS works in London as an editor. His work has previously appeared in the May Anthologies and The Edgeless Shape. He also writes for The Ecologist magazine.