Detour


One thread against another:

intimate crossings

Sainsbury-orange and silver birch

– the white bags tugging at my finger-joints


third week of March, and we've sprung forward

someone's turned the green man ('Walk now!')

upside down





Still-room


as moss: grease and powdered dark


fields in jars.


iris, rose, herbs fixture & loss

water's hungers

fleet as grass





Castle

I

The way the walls fell straight down,
sheer with the cliff

in the field below, the tractor's
tiny noise, square-ticking


II

half a floor
and nothing round it

fire imagines next to air,
the logic of flues


III

keep
turfed and flinty
keeps breaking through

IV

sticks,
and birds-nests

stairwell
railed off





Aubade

Be wary of the grace of aftermath. The gleam on fresh-scoured sands. Sprawled along the tideline, glyphs of wrack and mermaid's purse, starfish, embedded shells. Edge of wave as fringed lace shawl, feinting at the shore. Ladies' fingers. How discrete and pure the seagulls' cries, how high, how they make a distance. Luxe, calme, and hopefulness. But it's that balm I want to warn against, a daylight moon frail as the skin of milk. Minimalism's sublime – always a vasty backdrop. The relief of seeing the horizon – as if it hadn't been there all the time.

Rushes back, like the tide. What's beached here: the strong ribbed whelks with holes in their sides, or mashed till nothing's left but inmost spirals; broken glass made blunt, opaque. The opulence of salt-fed rust. Spread on a plate, the sweet scum from the top of the preserving-pan that hides the seethe below. Mistaking results for ends.



© Anna Reckin 2008