Embedded Files
Giant Cave Bear
‘Reindeer herders in a Russian Arctic archipelago have found an immaculately preserved carcass
of an ice age cave bear … with its teeth and even its nose intact.’ The Guardian, 14 September 2020
wintery forest of skull-borne branches
a fluvial copse of deer
their thousand hooves patter
dark smatter of rain
fording the she-bear’s dream
brain a dull boulder rolling
its leaden scrape unseals
her petrified mind
***
haunch hairs flattened like dead muddy grass
turf the workings of seized gears
grisly creaks
the hipbone’s pestle in socket
grinding ache from a stony aeon’s sleep
rouse mite and louse
wake blood-housed germ
the collective slumber disturbed
fleas stir in her tenanted armpits
in offal serfdoms nematodes wriggle
and the ranks of flesh-nested worms
***
loyal retainer a stripling sun
flanks her shadow’s low throne
follows its sluggardly pomp across the dirt
steams damp from the crumpled kirtle of fur
a mouldering brown commonwealth
crowned by a foetid breath-mingled mist
the stalest of airs leaking
a dank ghost
kisted in mildewed pleuras
***
snout like a ruined boot
the hanging flap of rigor-stiffened chin
a loose sole
admits the fiscal retinue of weather
through mineral-stained pikes
into a maw a-drip with the slow salivatory thaw
of a colder climate
the court of inner rain
time-salted the tip of bruin tongue lolls
memory’s pink muscle oiling black leathers
lip and tarry nose
a square of flared nostril
the rubbery neb toes mephitic corners of decay
shrouded by acrid smoke
scents peat bogs roasting and the estranged
ursine stink of her own meat self
***
in motherdom a hide-bound hunger
contrailed by twin shades
her nursling heirs
rising on hind legs
muzzle lifted
weak gaze sifting the perimeter
her armature of claws swung open
the scripture of she
to the ordained eye of the stars
her vision a prophecy here writ
in the catalogue of lower orders
feather berry fin
a thing
raw cud-muscle swaddled in dead skins
at lurch in the distant shimmer
***
shriveled and fragile as wildflowers
pressed in the vellums of old dermis
the faint antiquarian whiff
of a lost other world
its time-flattened biome
clenched between end-boards
stitched with shrunken cartilage
her squashed paws
an archive of interleaved prints
earth’s verso embossed on pad-fall
a rancid perfumery of unmapped smells
the discomposing stench of sow-sweat
spelling the thaw
end of earth’s hibernation
screed of stone
corpus of soil
the book of frost
book of doom
book of hel
Canadian poet Catherine Greenwood has recently completed a PhD in Creative Writing Poetry/Gothic Studies at the University of Sheffield, researching and writing a thesis titled Gothicising a Poetics of Displacement. EcoGothic poems inspired by Siberian permafrost unburials appear in The Gingko Prize Anthology, Reliquiae, Gothic Natures Journal IV, Canadian Literature’s special Poetics and Extraction issue, Route 57’s The Book of Water, The Goose, and Polar Borealis. Catherine was poet-in-residence at the 2022 ‘Art and Science of Species Revival’ symposium held at the University of York.
Copyright © 2024 by Catherine Greenwood, 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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