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A Pound of You
Beating heart in a bone castle
a wasp held against your tongue
its spirit instills the letter, in old Venetian type
lemon on teal on deckle-edge paper
dancing over the crossing stones.
White wings divide your face
your name and serial number
daring the cold sump water
black-letter with tall sloped capitals
oak-gall cursive and goose-primary quills.
A spooked stallion tethered at all four feet
to the raft chained across
the distance between your eyes
and the weight of unwanted passion
shakes till it reaches the shore.
Raven-red on the marble page
cat-claws drawn back into the fur
I held the ink-slash of your name in a locket
at my neck and it stopped my heart
pressed like a nib into soft wet cotton.
It still sings in the night in its stall
the leaden punch of its hooves on stone
the gravel behind your eyes
on rain-dark capitals, your temples
where the ghost in the shell
packed with dirt like dung in a bell
echoes that high horse-song
rippling with fear as you rise
cold rain in my love-blind lights.
Murano glassmen keen into the blade-like night.
The sun sinks in an oil-brown mash
I trace your toe-prints on the beach
the calligraphy of the dance
justified by the water's edge
I've run out of leads to follow.
A hard smack of waves in my face
as my knees grind into the sand
neck held under the gasping surf
great thunder of metal on rollers
breaking over our crowns like slates or hearts in a storm.
In the Barrel Of Her Ribs
Carrying my daughter on my hip
we sink into a shallow lake thronged with lilies
there are lamps beneath the water, there's no time
my eyes are torches, steepled in hers
her hands: here's a church, here's a steeple
open it up and here is a swarm of bees
gathering in the blue-white light
give me flatness, and air
and the whisper under trees
serotonin haze clouds a circle
from my grandmother's tongue to hers
in crushed coral sands a pale marble Isis
painstakingly sucked out from the black peat
and every colour word in the book
should be printed in that colour, every bird
should be that bird and fly off the page
but as your eye reaches the word water
the ink washes away, at fire there is no book
my friends forgot me, I have no face
to blush when she calls my name
I feel her growing inside me, a numb place
at first and then one day another
a totem, a herm, a scaffold
wrapped round with ropes and thick with blood and honey
I Never Slept in Barry MacSweeney's Bed
but when I woke to the taste of rain
I thought of your tongue in the trees
your train as you passed, my past
if you woke to the sound of the snow
in the treetops imagine the shakedown
heavy with it, weighted with it
black crows broke loose in the tinny dawn
threads of rain bored through the low
trunks bent together and traced the blue veins
on your wrists traced the morning glow
Geoff Sawers' poetry books include Scissors Cut Rock (Flarestack, 2005), A Thames Bestiary (with Peter Hay, Two Rivers Press 2008) and To the Forgotten (with Giles Goodland, Goose Cathedral Press, 2014). He has new work out this year in Bookends, San Pedro River Review and the Times Literary Supplement. Born in 1966, he was only diagnosed as autistic in his fifties. He lives in Reading.
Copyright © 2023 by Geoff Sawers, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author
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