Issue 25: Lyndon Davies
from An Allotment
Mugged ripe for the set-up
sorcerers spinning itch
through high weather in blight hall
once cordially explicable
messages sting half-wild
even dumber in my ears haw
by the plot waver
fitted skew as to purpose
listening just and watching now
into growth but hardly yet
a wisp or a whisper
wedged close neat in chivvied
suppled half inch top of it
Required each pact
flourish in a moment particle
keen wick to its heft
here in common no winged creed
for flat silbury or mere button
traps in eye pushing form
from oath to earth eased
all into it for a body ekeing
awe out of righteous parish
bluff host for a glut blushing
ebullient through stone share
fused hand weed or not weed
raking a new planet core
All gone suddenly leaving
me with the primal
leaf-ears what you handle
weevil or subterranean
bugaboo that was music this is
silent as a creeping enemy
sap ruction then rash of hoar
beating flight back
for grudge but held anyway
in two hands that goes almost
without saying if you must
soft say it though even if you can’t
green knots in the mush
Only that one stuck
had sovereignty over my intent
lit up her joints trilling
wry sot for a churl’s muzzle
of shaped latex or whatever it took
in the way of normal
forced other as part-animal
somehow at home but home
nobbled sideways and just lightly fringed
with nightmare in the tinge
levelled down resilient
rocked us in our own defeat
desire in the very set-up
Several kinds of injury
dibbed in this swelling plush
each chuckle of crocked pulse
what mischief in a feedback noose
axis materially out of kilter
bites yellow spot
in the infant terrible
deficiency of some kind or over-
production of clement hormones
air of the serried trees
packs mould in our bubble
free as the night free as the killing wands
a wave and it lifts us
Surfing to sink not on
although divine smelling it
in lech of clod
deep rot’s tug some discursive
prodding into variegated humours
what we call organic
accepting the too much
as flute and merry bells
under a ghost-blue cedar tree
led inevitably to tests
of courage and defective trust
exorbitant as a master
criminal in deferred innocence
Never quite cleanly rebutting
subtle yammer at the palace
sore matter of a gap
who dares what and why where
was it uttered from no recorded
narrative just a bead dropping
half crushed from wood’s mangle
there where the trauma bit
imposition of fraught energies
squared off here and squared away
under mesh its apparel
flawless as a weaver’s dream
of summer if summer came new
Whatever came before
considers you from its rubric
slope bevelled by flood-rip
how were the gods measured then
from any river bed under spate
just wait until it settles
far blunt thunder of rolled stones
no wit to coax anything
new until the torrent fades
slim contract for your parcel
admittedly and the sticks won’t grip
won’t penetrate is a scratch sufficient
blessing to be folked by the aery
Suddenly everyone about as lost
as they could be but still according
to a pattern of politesse
algorithmically resolvable
cooked reckoning of implied dues
if any lack left a residue
stamp continuous and the file
administratively complete although dog-eared
in a registry some human fall-out
but the record steady
comforting when that wail leaks
insidious on the other side
of a boundary marked legal
Fell humming out of sync
and humour out of variable dazzle
mocked lineage whose cued cells witch
into curl or astounded openness
more or less where we thumbed them
clumsy once in glad fetor
or misfires with originary fervor
awake then the tools sprouting
histories of translation and return
are the nymphs rising
fleet in the water tanks and descending
deep out of sight deep
into sight rising
Spark flitting through golden trailer parks
of crimped cirrus the line forks
to accommodate each shift
still branching as night quickens
unzipping its gaunt cicatrice
of velocities I lie down
into nowhere and the fault starts
all racked in its steeping nest
of low fraught melodies every mission
of the stemmed messenger
into the heart of panic
blithely tearing us now where we thought
god help us it had come to tickle
Stirring up felons
of all kinds in the leery dark
ruination of fine cloth
neither cruel nor human
except in the telling of it
making light of weakness
in the property hedge drilling through
or under it or gliding over
as the whimsy takes them
fun for the nagging tribes
of midnight but the ripples growing
ever faster and more destructive
the further out they travel
Not even pausing to consider
by the time the wake hits
trounced in its midden splash
of offerings any reason
to remain even partly calm
strung up in the wires listening
at both ends of the equation
distance as breaking flush
of speculative intimacies
not quite as immaculate as displayed
on the packet but still
illustrative of what it could have meant
to live in a platonic universe
That last wail of the one stolen
once hers yes but carried through
by witness an event
less event now than transformation
into submerged continuum
of the sacred it's the one seeing
who suffers bodying it raw
for the others but all that
has already foundered or pushed through
into surface a tableau
of poised attributes on the crumb
spear and wing and knob and pagoda
as if something is being figured
From air and to heir
what history and then the stirring hum
of somebody knowing something
I don't could I ever
framed in a heady landscape
decorous in part-resemblance
to all previous versions of itself
this disturbs me elsewhere
than I was once those seductive ridges
pulsing with interrogation
of their place in the woolly scheme
and ours curving round
consolatory without confirmation
So that what just slipped past quietly
or seemed to without notice
turns out to contain the crystal
peaseblossom cobweb
twin bastions of the running ditch
no point keeping watch
a fish jumps or a star
erupts when and where it must
looking down into forage I missed everything
I'd thought but the radium
was spilling its own christmas
blush over these rough bunched stalks
thrown back as I lay flummoxed
Tassels and dinky bats
glaucous flags of the state of magic
lodged swelling under uprush
spires of a bidden jewel
many low mounds egging
themselves into prophecy or assumed
some clue's there if we could just
be patient in the midst of travel
blind atrophy and attack
by unspecified alien adventurers
keeping our sky-burials
under wraps until we know
who's giving the eulogy
All soaking in by capillary action
down the hairs and along the unspoken
leads even this clogged
pre-intentional nature takes a hit
for nature now thoroughly stuffed
with required nutrients
moistures of Zeus or Moloch
it is all energy
and reserve for a spate of clowning
excess if the hat doesn't fit
cut your bloody ears off if the shoe
doesn't fit cut your bloody toes off
Grimm isn't it
Some body I once fled
on heat for all possible fictions
not yet shocked by the transport
costs wear to vehicles and continually
revised manifests that inherited monster
confined to a dexion-lined
stakeout with 360 degree views
readied itself for the choice
of decor and inter-cellular behavioural
typologies gait swami-wisdom-packages and all
necessary adjustments of angle
from a totality of gathered samples and specimens
couldn't even budge when the fire took
No adventure playground
sufficiently byzantine or dicey
no beam no corrugated
sheet for the sagging roof
of a niche scooped
into rotten brick dust fibreglass
lagging and asbestos chunks
quite broken enough or rusted back
materially/ethereally to its last jag
you are where you were
even when you are somewhere else
flutes singing from crag to crag
and there is a cave Thyrsis of rough music
Then furls itself into a species of veiny mace-head
slobbered all over by larvae at this point
we are given pouches of sweet money
obols and Medici escutcheon-knobs
already their own purchase therapy and display
and then the kisses start
red pouts in a scratchy bush
continually something hidden we're constrained
to wait for on a different time-scale
via differing systems of regulatory alignment
each evocation finding its exact response
in a circuit strangely open to it although retained
under shelter where we keep the organs
Eyes in the greenwood smart
each living its new normal
inextricably before the old
arrived where they'd ever thought it should
so none of this adds up
put down the steady cam lets have bumps
in the film even effigies
need to shake out a cramp
occasionally it's quite normal
for reality to go full arse
over tip on a raised paving slab
your blood on the lichen
limned horizontal face of elvis
In effect inexplicable
indecipherable or at least
impossible to untangle cleanly
and that is the story
further complicated by sudden colour shifts
weaving in who'd have thought
you could eat monkey-puzzle nuts
fatigue has its store
glands fattening in a leathern sheath
as maps fall in a flurry
from the bowers that mothered us
all this for a wary onset
but the toll unforeseeable
At the edge of measure
gift recognized as gift
what's coaxed from the furnace
broached by a sallow mite
or multi-mythical destroyer spun
from the iron core
to this altar weaving
illiterate enzymes into pulp
and fibre just left to be taken up
as flavour of a million flailing
galaxies come to roost
in a drowsy rite in a comic
augury charred on a pot bottom
Lyndon Davies was born in Cardiff in 1954 and now lives in Crickhowell, Powys. He is a poet, critic, editor, publisher and cultural activist, whose essays have appeared in Poetry Wales and the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. With his partner, the painter Penny Hallas, and the poet Graham Hartill, he founded and runs the Glasfryn Seminar series, and he also organised, with John Goodby, the Hay Poetry Jamborees of 2009-12, continuing these in a series of successor ‘Jam’ events.
In 2012 he founded the online poetry journal Junction Box, and he has since established and run Aquifer Press. His poetry has been widely published; it includes the collections Hyphasis (2006, Parthian), Shield (2010, Parthian), A Colomber in the House of Poesy (2014, Aquifer), Bridge 116 (2017, Aquifer), Reset (2019, Aquifer), The Materials (2019, Aquifer). He has also published two playscripts, The Man Who Painted Mountains (2019, Aquifer), and selected criticism, Resemblance: Selected Prose 2000-2019 (2019, Aquifer). With John Goodby he edited The Edge of Necessary: an anthology of innovative Welsh poetry 1966-2018 (2018, Aquifer / Boiled String).
