Issue 31: Adam Flint

Birth Search

                  Scottish Highlands, 1989

There are stars inside the earth, days like stars.

Low through cold birch and fashioned from clayshine

their dust climbs fir-thick skin of a dim earth

until eyeshine – picked from brightest tapestry,

depthless under needledark pines – 

attains a fawn-turn, full-face from three-quarter

profile in the regal water’s gold.

Garlands

                 (after CAD 211)

Stars reared on grasses after the wild sun

we balance and bear the tolls and graces of a vestigial shine

callow amid the looming season and rumours of futures like this

the night imagines itself and shifts its hollow weight from one

   darkness to the other      intimate unknown

familiar as a broken birthday      every scuttled occasion

the echo-laden streets predawn abandoned parks at sundown

bluer greens      deeper walls  shadowing the blood

like barred forewings a milkbeard mulls

   over on the way to an unwilled mark

leaking into fact

   It is the end of civil twilight

the sky steps down from dungeon to a bluer hex

dusk descends  above totter-grass      silky bents and melick

  false oats      soft lop

the lighting up time brushing roughened wasteland

sparser towards a warehouse of garlands standing on the rise

a kingless place, a storehouse-dwelling      I know  you know this garner

once we rested wings here distorted by a lunate mark

or from flying at night inside barns

owlet material wrecked on chaplet

lain with the staleness of repetitive light

a lattice-pattern of fortification tunneling hungry eyes

through which I would feed you, childhood shadow

         ruins

                  garlands