David Herd

May 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

David Herd is a poet, critic and teacher. His forthcoming collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet, 2012) and Outwith (Bookthug, 2012). He is the author of two critical works, John Ashbery and American Poetry and Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature, and his essays and reviews have been widely published in journals, magazines and newspapers. Recent writings on poetry and politics have appeared in PN Review, Parallax and Almost Island. He is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent, where he directs the Centre for Modern Poetry.

3 poems becoming elegy

1

This back pocket’s for keepsake,
An invitation to an exhibition,
Items to remember and maybe one day use.
Or discard,
Structures pass,
All structures pass,
The clear cut of an October morning carries a heavy moon.

Which we’ll see again
Notwithstanding all the indicators.
It is ultimately elegy underwrites the poem.
Shatters it.
Structures pass.
Assemblies of people.
The poem choosing bashfully
Here among.

2

And as the dream of every cell
is to become two cells,
so what the poem hankers after
is another poem,
splitting itself off,
feeding on the residue,
among stones,
among structures untouched 

where the elegy lies
where the poem handles circumstance
caught among the fibres of the old guy’s clothes,
the hats,
he wore great hats,
the thought is difficult,
cell by cell,
October among.

3

Lately it has become apparent
that the nation is deserving elegy. 

There are practices among us
we are tending to forget. 

For which the elegy works because the poem is here among
modeling its behaviour on things which pass. 

Codes, counteractions,
The poem has its lists.

The disorientation of the citizen
detained without charge. 

Not, actually,
Understanding where he is. 

Vulnerable, isolate.
Things pass.

You among 

When the plums were first ready
before the first one fell
when the roses were not yet planted
and the ground was dry, 

before the eucalyptus was cut down
bent double beside the gate
before the sea surged
before the value in the market dropped,

as the mallow came through
not for the first time
beside the road helped
by a brief warming, 

as copies proliferated
as the clematis bloomed
as people arrived
to complete a hazardous crossing, 

as the errors accumulated
before the apples ripened,
before the news broke, before the panic
before the denial stopped, 

in dense populations
among prosperous economies
when the plums were first ready
but before the first one fell 

before the goldfinches had gone,
before the nets were dry
before the crisis was with us
before a big old moon

as you walked from the table
to the kitchen door
we were glad that night
to have you among us.

Ecology

Along the broken road
nearby the disparate houses
where summers, coming into purple
the mallow blooms,
scattered,
carting children,
complex tools and fishing nets,
women,
‘environment acting’,
stop and exchange;
beneath wires where
afternoons
goldfinches gather,
‘Adoration of the Child and the Young St. John’,
nearby the outbuildings,
a variant,
slipped open early,
‘based on conflict’,
as morning comes;
where seagulls stand allover into language,
where mallows bloom purple along the broken road,
scattered, disparate,
‘beautifully economical’,
you stood one time
struggling
to arrive at terms.

Ecology (out set)

What stands discrete

scattered against the outbuildings

mallow            goldfinch        complex terms

and you, stood there

not knowing if you’re coming or going

‘beautifully economical’

‘hostile world’

One by one

The poem splits,
It has no desire to become a nation,
It traffics in meanings, roots among stones,
Mallow,
People,
The things they have with them,
Corrugated outbuildings
Along the broken road. 

Immigrant through the streets
It craves sources of stability,
Processes it might settle its elegy among;
It splits,
To begin again,
It seeks the moon broken across the estuary,
People arriving,
One by one.

MTC Cronin

May 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

MTC Cronin has written numerous collections of poetry (including several co-written with fellow-Australian poet, Peter Boyle) and a number of volumes of avant-garde cross-genre micro-essays. She currently lives, with her partner and three young daughters, on an organic farm (specializing in fresh Spanish produce) in the hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, Australia.

The Sky According to Laws

after Nikola Madzirov

The sky according to laws passed for the protection
of those who are murdered, says nothing.

In this silence the sky invites the stones
to unpile themselves and the birds
to swallow their songs.

The sky doesn’t watch and the sky never listens.

There is no news.

That the world is bigger than the earth is not news.

That the little stream could cause a king
to create an army is not news.

That lovers at dawn are monkeys and frogs
at dusk, is not news.

The sky has no sense of them and is their entreaty.

The sky according to laws in force to discipline
the carefree, unhomes anything with a soul.

For this purpose, the sky is unified.

Christopher Pollnitz

May 27, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

Born in Adelaide, Christopher Pollnitz lectured for over thirty years at the University of Newcastle.  He remains a conjoint lecturer of that University and over many years has spent many months in Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham.  He has written articles on the Australian verse novel and a range of Australian poets, including Judith Wright, Peter Porter, Les Murray, Alan Wearne and John Scott.  In the 1980s Paul Kavanagh and he ran the Mattara Poetry Prize, since re-established as the Newcastle Poetry Prize, and edited the annual anthologies.  Picaro Press has brought out a Wagtail pamphlet of his own poems, Little Eagle (2010).  He is the editor of D. H. Lawrence’s Poems for Cambridge University Press’s critical edition of Lawrence’s Works.  The first two volumes of the Poems, including all the verse Lawrence collected or planned to publish, will appear later in 2012.  Examining the original manuscripts of Lawrence’s verse has involved considerable travel in the USA, including a visit to the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, which (as reported in the “Idylls”) holds just one Lawrence manuscript poem.  Only in recent years has he ventured outside the libraries and private collections of North America to see and reflect on some other aspects of the continent.

                        ii.  New Jersey

We are in the country of the yellow school bus
rushing through it on the morning express to Newark
and on into New York, while the clapboard houses
turn their backs away from us and turn their porches
towards the trim white churches with those little
steeples like sharpened pencils.  The young father
across the aisle sitting sideways barely seems to notice
his daughter for the crossword or Sudoku
balanced on one of his knees, but when his daughter
rests her tight-curled head on the other,
he gently strokes it—not idly, with assurance.
Having listened to much talk that is more rhythm
or dance of self-assertion, self-obeisance,
I like him for his silence, this young father,
his working pencil, and absent hand still stroking.
Now that he’s not required for cotton-picking,
and buses and brief spires seem to have lost their
centring function, Amtrak passing by them,
perhaps his hands have power to drive the dibble
into this lakeland, estuarine country
setting the sharp American grain anew.

            iii.  The Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum

Starting from Brooklyn, where New York’s most suicidal
cyclists come home from days that haven’t killed them
we take the inevitable subway to Manhattan,
across the river the sun coming down on Liberty
visible a few seconds above the roofs of factories
in working Brooklyn.  It’s a beautiful idea,
Liberty, from a distance.  Before the dereliction
of factories springs up to fill the vista
there is Ellis Island that once filled the factories
with workers (i.e. slaves).  Our tour-guide on the Island
history teacher Marcus Smith, had saved to send his
grandfather Schmidt on a visit back to Austria:
What I should go back to that shithole for? he queried.
But shitholes are the closeups of our memory. 

Connoisseur-collector-eccentric Pierpont Morgan
is wearing his fez tonight in the Library
and adjusting his hooded lamp above Melancholy,
his refinement tracing every curve of the burin
in a luxury of sorrow.  On the plains somewhere out in Iowa
under the rail a coolie’s set cross-wise a sleeper
and taking the sledge has driven a spike home, half-cognisant
it is himself he is crucifying.  Meanwhile Morgan
has laid the Dürer aside and turned his attention
to the thimble of an Assyrian seal—two monsters
in their internecine embrace constructing a pattern.
Does he reflect what empires need in the building?
Does he think of the coolie?  No, his focus
is elsewhere as he repositions the lampshade. 

In the Museum the summer exhibition
on Romantic Gardens includes everything Morgan collected,
from engravings of Antoinette’s dairy fantasy
to Pope’s Twickenham and Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”:
let everyone into the Garden, you inherit Bedlam.—
As you leave, out of certain gratings in the pavement
comes a rumble and whisper as of Morlocks feeding.
Marcus Smith, I need your help and my experience
having once worked an hour in that Library (closed this summer)
and trained a Morgan light on my chosen manuscript:
let me know the conditions of my scholarship and labour.

                        iv.  Ground Zero

From the wide-screen windows of the World Finance Center
squashed into two dimensions like a Jackson Pollock,
diagonals of yellow cranes order what the mind’s eye
conjures as no more than a writhe of metals.
You don’t get it, do you? you point out.  And truly
I fathom nothing of this notch in the scrapers’ skyline
about the morning or the weeks that followed.
Having seen a good Hamlet at the Folger
we know the Tudors’ stereoscopic vision
of the fall of greatness, still feel the medieval
Schadenfreude; but listening at another window
to a New Jersey fireman who came in after
work on 9/11 to join the rescue
(or mortuary) operation reconfigures
the Day as the tragic heroism of the Many.
Talking to a tour who’ve gathered round him,
mid-statistic in what doubles as self-therapy,
the veteran breaks off, struggling to re-enter
the horror he knew.  The volunteers were his heroes;
it was their work dead and living firemen were doing.
Descending we find the Memorial Museum
adds the dimension of grief: we are chosen
(is it my face—all struggle, no comprehension?)
to be led by an ex-fireman and fireman’s father
past ceiling-high blow-ups of a Bosch Thebaïd
to a collage of little snaps from family albums
where he points out his smiling son and grandkids.
He was lucky; his son was among the found bodies.
Irresistible the catharsis that wells up out of
sources this deep, but something in me now refuses
to get it.  Have the deeds that call up pity
and terror themselves been tangled in atrocity
poisoning the well-springs of our deepest feelings?
Or no—is it not that the katabatic pulsations
which wrecked the Towers are still radiating
out and out, both disuniting peoples
and shaking foundations of many a place of worship
till the Jefferson Memorial itself trembles?

                        v.  The Whitman Way

We’d been told to see the Korean War Memorial
and having seen will truly never forget it:
in this capital of the war against terrorism
patrols a platoon that wears every face of terror,
half of the boys scared shitless, half to numbness.
But really I prefer the Lincoln mausoleum:
we pace about him in an amphitheatre
and here he smiles like a benign grandfather,
then another step and you see the glint of vision
in the stern eye required for nation-building.
Who knows what must be given and what taken
wears the stern mask of the whole tragic drama;
he knows what he has to do and he is a-doing,
he knows what must be done and the boys are dying. 

We have walked The Whitman Way too, up on F Street.
It passes by the National Portrait Gallery,
the Patent Office once, where Whitman worked and
spent evenings visiting hospital camps for the wounded
that grew in the autumn rain on Washington’s fringes
though I wonder where.  He was a good visitor, Whitman,
wrote letters for the boys, sat with them while they were dying
and poured out gallons of sympathy in “Drum-Taps.”
Surgeons would hone a scalpel on their boot-soles
to speed an amputation, and the nation’s poet
dared mention the smell of wet gangrene under canvas
(‘With soothing hand I pacify the wounded’)
but didn’t go on, lest it read like criticism;
for the surgeons did what they must and they were a-carving
and Whitman, he was a seer yet unforeseeing.
We have even trudged up through the democratic
ranks of the dead at Arlington Cemetery
past the bold surnames of forgotten generals
and the smaller stones of ORs named and mourned for.
At the Kennedies’ shrine near the summit the eternal
almost invisible flame you know is there burning
flickers up to blueness, and a black helicopter
beats up from the Pentagon like a heart fibrillating.
The times are the times and the presidents are a-changing
but they know what they have to do and they are a-doing,
they know what must be done and the boys are dying.

vi. Takoma, DC

Sunday morning, the Farmers’ Market busy,
young families adrift in the Main Street sunshine;
the Baptists with somewhere to go to, the Adventists
emphatically not going there, and the remainder
like me, not going anywhere, just being.
Except for Sharyn, that is, who’s opened this morning,
my daughter’s made my appointment, we’ve made friends talking
as she cuts my hair, about daughters who look after us,
how mine is a Thursday’s child, hers a travel agent
but the one time Sharyn has flown, on a tour to Las Vegas
her daughter asked, Why’re you going all that way for?
No, she’s no traveller, enjoys a long week at the salon
doesn’t mind trimming beards, and still sees her first client.
Waiting in the sun for my daughter to collect me
I spot a poster from the Spring Poetry Festival,
Atwood’s “Habitation.”  A passerby stops to read it,
asks her husband’s opinion and interprets his silence,
I didn’t think much of it either.  The morning’s sour note;
neither’s emerged from the Ice Age or the forest.
Here comes a hand-holding father whose daughter totters
under the Emperor of Icecream she’s clutching
in the other hand: Eat it quick, if you want to have it.
But he kneels, re-sculpts it for her and restores it.
I’m on her side; I want the morning’s sweetness
to go on and on.  And here comes my daughter
bearing bags with the week’s provisions.  We share them
and there’s one left to do some farewell shopping.
She chooses walking-shoes for her move to Texas,
I a T-shirt with a print of D.C.’s counties
—top of them all this leafy, sunny suburb.
I want Takoma on the map of my hereafters.

Laksmi Pamuntjak

May 19, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

Laksmi Pamuntjak, writer and poet, was born in Jakarta, Indonesia. Author of two collections of poetry, Ellipsis (2005, one of The Herald UK’s Books of the Year) and The Anagram (2007), a treatise on violence and the Iliad entitled Perang, Langit dan Dua Perempuan (War, Heaven and Two Women) (2006), short stories in The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art (2006) and four editions of the award-winning Jakarta Good Food Guide, she translated and edited Goenawan Mohamad’s Selected Poems and On God and Other Unfinished Things and wrote the preface to Not a Muse: International Anthology of Women’s Poetry (2008).

She publishes articles on politics, film, food, classical music and literature, and has participated in numerous international literary events and festivals including National Poetry Festival (Australia), Wordfest Festival (Canada), Struga International Poetry Festival (Macedonia), The Asia-Pacific International Writers’ Festival (Delhi, India) and Winternachten Festival (The Netherlands). Her poems and short stories have been published in numerous international journals, among others Poetry International (Holland), HEAT (Australia), Biblio (India), Asia Literary Review (Hong Kong), Takahe (New Zealand), Drunken Boat (New York) and PEN America (New York). Co-founder of Aksara bookstore, she owns Pena Klasik publishing house and produces art performances for Komunitas Utan Kayu. In 2009, she was appointed jury member of the Prince Claus Awards based in Amsterdam. Her first novel, The Blue Widow, will be published next year. She now writes for The Jakarta Globe.

Light Matters

All he ever talks about is the light.
In giving me a book about a writer’s
retreat to the homes of Capadoccian
monks, I suppose he also expects me
to think about the light that shines on
certain stones on certain mornings.  
Sure, I say, but the colour of white
is the night. It is not the sun that guides
you to white. It is moonlight on stone.
He considers this, then suggests that
I should pay more attention to Anatolian
mornings, for there is a tintinnabuli to
such brightenings, hazel and silver
birches edging forward,
water fowls moving stepwise.
When said writer dies not a month
since he gives me the book,
he quietly goes to pieces. 
Then he sits down to an obituary
of the sort that would make the dead
writer and Narcissus himself blush.
While he weeps in his own Virgilian hell,
I keep coming back to the railway of light
that fell across my chest that afternoon;
each time his eyes rested on the two bells on
each end, those soft and yielding summits,  
I wonder whether he was actually savouring
the peach pill-boxes of a building in the 6th,
the one that gave the Flatiron its shape
and charge. Or whether he was tonguing
in his mind’s eye the milky ovals next to the
Rapunzel tower. I wonder when he looked at me
whether it was my light that he saw,
or the light around me,  
the one that had nothing to do with me.

Postscript 2: The Surrender of May Bartram  

The matter is quite simple, John:
It’s just that whenever I see you,
something in me collapses, and I
prefer your reading between the lines.
And even when you hold me, knowing
something deep about what I need,
I still prefer what is inferred. 

There is nothing new in this, of course;
Cyrano is a living testimony.  
He and Roxane moon about eternity
but what they really desire is desire. 
In this I am Cyrano.
But this is the real me, and
this is how I feel for you. 

And to protect this feeling I collapse into
myself, and a little into something outside
of myself, so that you may find something
sweet and a little mysterious in the
searching, in the idea that there is
beauty in the out-of-scale. Something
sweet that is still somewhat me. 

And even though I will never tell you this,
and even if my calves will strain and burn
through the silky black, I fully intend to
wear a garter belt when you are not around.
It’s just that I want to stay true to the gaze
that gives you wings, because May is so
long and so faraway and it’s not even me.

Krishna to Arjuna: On Bhisma’s Final Day

The other day I saw a man straggling across a plain; not once did he raise his eyes. He was walking as though in the gathering thunderstorm, under the sky turning mottled green, through the cracks in the undergrowth, he would find the tiny light in his mother’s womb.

A bird nosedived into a hole in the darkened earth, whose home whose hell I couldn’t tell, but there was something about the man that was deeply touched, as though through that one gesture a lifetime of trust had been reassembled, and he let the tip of the arrow drive itself in.

Jessie Tu

May 19, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

A music teacher currently calling Bondi home, Jessie Tu was born to Taiwanese mother and Chinese father. At the age of five, she immigrated to Australia- Melbourne, and then relocating to Sydney. She studied music at university having played the violin from the age of nine. She now teaches full time at the Rose Bay independent girls school Kambala and enjoys writing as a means of connecting with her community. Her poetry deals with her identity growing up as an immigrant and the comic trails and tribulations of being a ‘banana’ (white on the inside, yellow on the outside) and the shift from childhood to adulthood. She has recently received a 6 month residency as a Café Poet (a program funded by the government assisted  Australian Poetry Organization) at her favourite café in Sydney – WellCo Café in Glebe. She has had her writing published in Peril Magazine and VibeWire. In December 2011, she participated in a National Young Playwrights’ Studio workshop where a selected few young Australians from across the nation came together with industry leaders to write, learn and create new works.

My mother’s heart is a small, good thing

My mother’s heart is a small, good thing.
It is lovely and unassuming like my stain glassed mosaic lamp
illuminating a room as an angel lights the sky.
It is calm like the winds on a gentle Sunday at 3.
It hums quietly to itself when no one is listening.
It never stirs at the absence of peace.
My mother’s heart is a small, good thing.
It sings at the sight of a neighbour’s garden
transforms her willowy features to delicate soft expressions.
Her heart is a keen student.
It swallows with the force of a sea cave, it
kills all light
Her horrendous freedom, uncaged-
Her fear is mightier than might
She hums to her own tuneful language,
Her solid stare, unpardonable-
She leaks through me like a bleeding creature
Her agility fails tonight,
And I have nothing but my intermediate embrace
To comfort and progress. 

House

These walls tremor with their private language-
carves a sound sculpture of a musical elegy,
a requiem for my sleepless soul.

Unafraid,
I bring myself to this curtailing ostinato,
breathes soaked as self-pitying woe. 

The city abode confines me with
a strange solitude, yearning to disperse.

Feet crawl on broken pavements
obedient in structure and anatomy –
they pace with diligent trust in my heavy head, though-
they should beware
this head is too fruitful
for small talk
         and
hollow prayers.

They settle with a blur,
accepting the inevitable- 

tomorrow will rise like today,
a repetition of yesterday.

Mona Attamimi

May 19, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

Mona Zahra Attamimi is an Indonesian-Arab. She lived as a child in Jakarta, Washington DC and Manila.  She moved to Sydney at age ten with her family. She has studied Anthropology and Women’s Studies at ANU and ISS in Holland. Currently she is completing a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. She enjoys writing poetry and short stories. And through writing and reading, she is interested in exploring diverse experiences of cultural displacement and marginalisation. Her poems have appeared in Southerly and forthcoming in Meanjin. She is an editorial assistant for Mascara Literary Review

Drifter                                                                                   

In my hard boots
I wandered into a field of thistles
crushing violet weeds,
bits of bricks and tiles,
broken glass from a house 

I once knew.  My mouth was wild,
foaming her name.  I heard my child’s
moonless moaning and my house
bursting into a cake of flames. 

After the rain, by the river-death,
I slept for a night in the shadow
of a broken boat.  I piled humus
under my head and dreamt
of a throat

tangled in weed,
white as bone, my wife’s
goosefleshed thighs floating
in the swamp that sank
our river-home. 

As I fold and unfold
a sleeping bag
by an alley and a railway track,
I brush away
the phantom of a man
drinking coffee and breaking bread
inside his daughter’s home.     

Now, my hard boots hide
crooked toes,
crack bush burrows,
barks, twigs and lie
about the state of my soles.

Mangosteen

Do not say a prayer, shed a tear,
nor place a wreath on my grave,
but bury me instead under a mangosteen
tree once I’m stiff like lead. 

Once I’m dead, drip mangosteen milk,
and wring the sweet white arils
till its juices soak
my funeral shroud.  And when I die, 

embalm my head and tuck
my teeth in black-purple rind,
let the mangosteen roots coffin
my bones, skin and spine.  

When night comes, let me rustle the leaves
with my ghostly arms, and let me
scare the thieving monkey that climbs
on its fruit-bearing branch. 

Once I’m freshly dead and buried under
the fallen fruits, let the soil and grass 
pickle my heart and liver
in mangosteen’s heavenly pus.

Indran Amirthanayagam

May 19, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

Indran Amirthanayagam directs the Regional Office of Environment, Science, Technology and Health for South America, based in the United States Embassy, Lima. A member of the United States Foreign Service, he has served as Public Affairs Officer in Vancouver, Canada,  Monterrey, Mexico, and in Chennai, India. He is a poet, essayist and blogger in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese (http://indranamirthanayagam.blogspot.com).  He has published six collections of poetry, including The Elephants of Reckoning ((Hanging Loose Press, NY, 1993) which won the 1994 Paterson in the United States, and The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, NY, 2008). A new collection of poems in Spanish, Sol Camuflado (Camouflaged Sun) has just been published in Peru ( Lustra Editores, Lima, May 2011).

Off the Field

In the end we have only ourselves to pick up from the grass,
the bed, the gymnasium floor. The dead will have their say
in dreams, and fond ones too, how the boy used to laugh

when chasing the ball on Duplication Road, or the girl back
in the village, shyly accept the glance of her neighbor’s son,
by the well, over a garden wall, the victims, the left behind

after the tsunami or the shelling without end, abroad,
processed, rebuilding their lives in the company of
Australians or Canadians, new people, while the distant war

on its nightly visit to parents, single or a pair, does not curse
the kid born away, who loves the latest fad on satellite radio
and the girl in his class who sports an infectious laugh.

Sharing the Load

There are friends who travel part of the way, then drop off
into the woods, I miss them in the darkness and thank them

here for their time–the one who sliced the last stanza off
a poem which later became  another man’s favorite to speak

in the ear of love and feel its breath whistle by the lobe,
to eat and be eaten, write as Cyrano de Bergerac, thank you

for giving me the chance to serve. And the other who said
I have a secret country in my verses, that lends color

and light to my images,  Alastair, let me write your name
although you said you cannot carry books any more,

that the local library must do. I understood. I have
moved a library through the Americas and the books

are dusty, creased and tired and many still unread,
time to house them with good air flow and a bookkeeper,

somebody else, a young man or woman, my own children,
if they wish to carry the load. There is gold in the paper

and lead, memories of a far-away life, with elephants
crossing at dusk, white ants hungry for pages.

Kenneth Steven

May 17, 2012 / mascara / 0 Comments

Kenneth Steven’s tenth collection of poems is appearing in the summer of 2012. He’s from Highland Scotland and much of his work is inspired by the wildscape of the north and west of the country. He’s also a widely published writer of prose for adults and youngsters alike, and he translates the work of many Norwegian authors.

www.kennethsteven.co.uk

A Green Woodpecker

The day is like dead wood –
No colours, only shades of grey, 

The gentle breath of my steps
Leaves a ghost story written in the grass.

 A stillness like that when snow falls
Except there is no snow, and none all winter – 

Only the river in its silvering among the trees
Whispers the same old journey to the sea; 

Only the moon, low above the hills,
Frail as a ball of cobwebs. 

On moss feet, I go into the wood
And a great door closes behind me: 

Little quiverings of things
Quick among twigs; 

Two deer, their eyes listening,
Flow into nowhere in a single blink. 

I look up, into a pool of light
And hold my breath: 

Swans stretching north
Swimming the open sky –

The silence so huge
I hear their wings.

And I think,
As I begin to go back home;

I came here searching one bird
And found all this instead: 

How like my life.

Otter

light swivels on the night edge:
the full moon’s eerie beam
wobbles like a child’s balloon, huge, and breaks
upwards at last, into the clearing dark 

otter trundles over wetscapes, crying
as points of milk-white stars shine clear;
he curls into himself in seaweed
through the swell and ebb of tide until
the oystercatchers drip their calls across the sky
and orange gold the dark melts into day –
then he’s off, a scamper on the sea edge
scenting, searching, circling –
flowing into river edges, a thousand streams
sewn inside the silk of him, for ever