Embedded Files
five poems from LAPWING
Fabulous artificer, the hawklike man.
You flew. Whereto? Newhaven – Dieppe,
steerage passenger. Paris and back.
Lapwing. Icarus. Pater. ait.
Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering.
Lapwing you are. Lapwing he.
— James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 208
Missing
Up late scavenging the reels
for a glimpse of him in someone else's story.
Image into video into image, eyes training
to the happiness of every other flock. Flick.
Finding comfort in distributed chaos.
Times Square. A child pelts into a blanket of pigeons,
arms flung wide into their grey skein. A singularity
scattered into two hundred sets of wings. Flick.
Grainy footage of a cockatoo bouncing
on a woman’s head. Yellow crest unfurled, grey leg
ringed with its tiny chain. Flick.
A sea gull rips the greater part of a Cornish pasty
out of a young man’s hand. Flick.
Yet another clip of those fucking starlings. Flick.
Peet sees each one in the way that a tiny glass eye
sees, in the way that a wired open beak
sees. Flick.
Tring Museum. Two hundred
stuffed hummingbirds turn slowly
in a tombola of joy.
Are those his thin legs
crossed on a metal bench to the left?
Tribute
There goes the wind and nowhere
to shelter, hedgerow a mere myth.
Peet, the last bird in this flattened world,
makes her way towards the temple
called Lonely Oak, picks between the shrine
of brightly painted stones. Peet,
pinned in an endless lunar turntable.
The field has no border and the crucible turbine
is always so unsure of its delineation.
Each speckled egg, she visualizes, is a trinket
dangling from a blue thread; each lung
a thumbprint of cloud in the darkening sky.
I am always about to lose my way.
And in the distance, Lapwing. In the near distance,
Lapwing. Nearest, Lapwing. Same old,
same old, life as thin as contact paper.
Miscellaneous wants
WANTED, HORSE.
Cob size, for small place, to cart
and plough. – State price. -Apply.
WANTED, LAPWING EGGS,
highest prices given. – Apply.
WANTED, LAPWING EGGS
until 14th April. Prices high. – Apply.
WANTED, LAPWING EGGS
as in former years. Highest price
given. – Apply.
I will buy LAPWING EGGS
from now until 14th April.
High prices. – Apply.
WANTED, CHILD
to bring up. – Apply.
Black and white
Typical evening for the remainers -
just the regular October light show
from the B-Road.
Here comes the inevitable drag.
All the same tricks.
All the regular haunts. Peet, sitting atop
the empty nest, begins her costume brainstorm:
1. Halloween as a spray of gravel;
2. Halloween as a scattered pack of clubs;
3. Halloween as a chess board and all
its pieces chucked up into a hurricane;
4. Halloween as a terrible explosion
in the domino factory;
5. Halloween as spoondrift in the dark.
All group costumes, she reflects.
All requiring the flock and their inevitable
ups and downs.
Peet remembers her chickhood
of satsuma rind, her squash threaded with twine.
Almost flying.
All those black evenings
watching Kes, face behind the cushion,
light left on in the hall.
Wings
[I’m] almost sure that Daedalus merely wished to show his son that no border could hold him, that high enough, the skyline would remain constant, that journeying is myriad. [I’m] almost sure that Daedalus merely wished to show his son what porosity could feel like.
Hannah Copley’s first collection, Speculum, was published in 2021 by Broken Sleep Books. Her second, Lapwing, is forthcoming with Pavilion Poetry in Spring 2024. Her work has recently appeared in POETRY, Poetry Birmingham, Under the Radar, Bath Magg, Into the Void, and others .
Copyright © 2023 by Hannah Copley, 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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