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Herminium Monorchis:
Box Hill, 22nd June
Herminium Monorchis:
Box Hill, 22nd June
Calcicolous, on the circum
-wealden cusp, we watch
these distant jets, seeming issue
of that ancient zone, of industry,
swim through their own mirages.
Beneath this brink scarp
a map is spored
from memories of greensand:
defunct beech boundaries,
tangled root espaliers, staving
the humid undersong of decay.
Sumped air, resinous, and
ellipsis of an old hammer pond,
quenching sun.
Today, though, we turn
back, to the lee spur, where,
sanctuaried
by the perpendicular
they cling to
their “terracettes”:
tiny
they answer
to no intention;
so we submit
to the patient
grammar
they, with their mute,
snail’s-horn tongues
of alien green compose
beyond hearing
on the zither of grasses;
drift, with the
shivering schools
of sorbus,
panicked by wind, which coast
this alternate island
in the aromatic atoll,
of their locales;
to find
the summer’s place
their scent’s
sense’s singular
pleasure
lives
in us;
inappropriable shoal
of feeling
where vestigial organs
without species, wake,
to find their bodies
in a different time.
Leaf Sonnets (i): Rowan
Leaf Sonnets (i): Rowan
These thousand street-side rowans, their leaves,
Intricate islands, and the berries,
Are the city’s entrance, to mountains:
Bunchberry, and the alpine cranberry,
In the lichen-lined clefts, of the rock,
The fragile magic, of diapensia, before rain:
Somewhere the serrations
Of the high cinquefoil
Mesh, like gears of memory, to these
Ratchet leaves: more than a family likeness,
This, the slow, pawl-guided working, the tock,
In life’s constant chronometer
Of loss: in the calendar of feelings,
The swifts, already parted, circle, and fly off.
Cowslips
Cowslips
(For the 130th Anniversary of William
Morris’s Polemic against Victoria’s Jubilee)
Foot-foundered, at evening,
We watch the scattered cowslips
Parody fireworks
In the “Coronation Meadow”.
Given
As “heritage”
It is not where they grow.
They live
In a different meadow.
There, we know,
Work’s wedded to the world’s
Pattern, ornament of its arriving:
Cowslip, oxeye, the ribwort
Plantain: sparrowhawks
In their sylvan adjacencies
Of blue.
Cutting our gains
The corncrakes
Thrum
On undiscovered commons
Of song
Oliver Southall lives and writes in London, though he sometimes walks out of it. New work will appear in The Germ soon.
Copyright © 2016 by Oliver Southall, 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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