The great divide

Ahead of me was the beaten body of the deer,

its tan legs splayed out across the painted centre line.

To my right the car ticked over patiently

and beyond it, dancing above the yellow of the plains,

Montana rose and fell, its lung-beats green

and long since calcified.

I must have torn one of its arteries

to make it give up so much blood,

which now, finding grooves and channels in the road,

rolled down to pool

by a trailhead information stand,

which taught in flat municipal tones

the song of the great divide.

How explorers

edged towards it in canoes

watching for movement in the peaks,

how geologists, cartographers,

swarmed after them

writing out this gorgeous hydrologic fact

for the always-evening stillness of their libraries.

How years later, through the silence of Montana afternoons,

struck the lonesome, rigid steps,

of rangers planting signs.

But no one teaches this –

when you hit a deer on the great divide

and have to move the body off the road,

which side do you move it to?

To the east, so that its blood runs long and slow

into the tar-slicked Texan Gulf,

or to the west, to tumble through the mountain waters

of the Blackfoot,

Clark-Fork and Columbia,

to be slung back by the mad Pacific

and turned to foam

against the lowest cliff-hugging branches

of some Oregon state park?

And nobody prepared me for that electric fear

as I approached the body

and moved my hands towards its legs,

scared that this once lithe uncertain thing

might flinch.

Then, as my fingers tightened round it, guilt

came tumbling back

to swill around my belly

that this was all because of me,

that instead of being a machine

like this animal deserved

and braking when I could have stopped in time,

my wild heart was on another continent

thinking of a girl in London

where the bus-bombed city

wears the ghost of oceans like a hat.

Tulips

It was only trying to waste time

until I could politely leave Granny to her dying

and take the train home

that I really looked , for the first time in years,

around her living room. How could I

not have noticed it before?

There on the left hand wall (as you face

out through the conservatory

to the twelve tulip garden), Odysseus’ maids

hanging by their necks.

They’re leant forwards so horribly

as if daemons flying or

as if their feet blown backwards in the wind.

Telemachus is looking on bare-chested –

looking older than his nineteen or twenty years

and is that pity or confusion in his face?

One of them, picked out in yellow

on the wash blue sky, seems not yet dead

or wholly drained of vitriol. Her face

pushed forwards as you would

to spit. The bitterness perhaps

that she had no trial, that all this came

and went in an afternoon

after polishing the floor, before

she could grab the words to plead,

explain, beg mercy or farewell –

which words now unforthcoming.

Or maybe that is just the face you make.

Looking now it’s hard to tell.

Viking poem

A rather long semi-translation I did of a medieval Icelandic poem can be found here.

And for sir?

For me it must be grouse; for the flavour

yes,

but mostly for the sound: the tearing

of skin as it comes away from breast;

the slurp

as the back is sucked clean of tender flesh;

the crack

as ribs break sharply into two

to make way for my tongue, their empress -

all these exquisite as only things from God can be,

but nothing beats the mortal ping,

so high and so soon dead

of a piece of shot falling onto china.

At once it is the fireworks of gunshot springing

like monkeys off the trees,

the pervy panting of the dogs,

the whispered arc of the falling bird,

and the silence of its last, unseen

flails upon the grass.

There is just left the as if reverential absence

of the hanging shed,

a perch of guiltless penitents, to transform

this silent music to the holy

before we’re back to linen shifting,

the echoes of this room

and metal on china once again.

Dreams

So what I want is just a gait,

a way of loping,

a horse walking into town

with its sleeping rider

swaying,

how a leopard swings its head

to turn and strut to the sound of languor

after eating.

The beat of leather soles on stone,

that bugle call

the prince bears with him

through his wearisome dominion,

a way to own,

a way to lord the sweating jungle over,

a way for everyone to see,

a way for six-shooter-swinging hips to be.

But there’s another kind of movement too.

Imagine two a.m. on a quayside;

a boat has loosened from its mooring and

is being reeled out to sea.

You feel it passing by you

into that big ball of darkness

and there’s just a little urge

to leap in after it and float

until you both become unseen.

Four-four

When I was a kid, going asleep

meant Eric Cantona,

the same moment spun out

like a careworn disc

until delicious grey arrived.

I never bothered to watch

him score – peace for me

lay in seeing him paw the ball

across the halfway line,

the ruffle of burst nets

rippling in his stride.

It’s a different picture now -

a man on a green shrub plateau,

sub-Arctic in its every hair,

a slate river diagonally

across his sight. He casts

a white line and waits until it curls,

drags, and sinks the fly.

He flicks it up and back then

drives it forward, spraying

the air with crystal light

as the fly dries and drops

like a feather to its bed.

I watch and wait, and the sun

grumbles home, each time the

same: the fly, by dark, is sunk.