Giles Watson

'Forget me not, ' I thought you said,
and your gaze was straight and true.
I wondered, by your garden's edge,
could I disremember you?
...

1. Morrigan

There's a way of ripping Roman flesh
that only ravens can do. You take
...

Last winter, incendiaries ignited
A bloom of flame in your bedroom,
And the gramophone gouged
Through ‘Lili Marlene’ one last time
...

There is a stile still standing in the ghost
of a hedge, and a broken gate beside it, opening
on the pathless nowhere of a ploughed field.
...

Sometimes the flayed things have spirits.

When my husband is drunk in bed, I go down
to the cellar to find them, their stripped
...

Leaning over a stone bridge, knowing
Daubenton’s bats slept
beneath me, wrapped in leather,
pollard willows, white clouds
...

Is the moment of sunsplashed brilliance,
the walking-in by chance at the time
of greatest need. The blessing is swallows
alive from Africa, cavorting in English sky.
...

1.

Perfect Pearl – prince pleaser –
Clear and clasped in precious gold:
...

Stamped with characters of beauty, their veins
Like waters at a confluence of streams, arrowheads
Point heavenwards. The traceries of their leaves
Are essays in divine proportion: three lobes
...

Beating the bounds of the parish, I saw
The old gods on the outskirts, skulking in the woods.
It was all moonbreak and sunglow. Woodwales jittered.
...

Her first labour: making a globe
For the price of a silk-wrapped fly.

Her second, to trundle with it
...

Out of the slurry of vascular tissue:
xylem and phloem, leaf veins, stomates
and the fleshy organs of flowers, she
took form. Her irises were a coalescence
...

How many miles of mist-shrouded ramparts
Have I walked, soaked to the knees in dew,
With the solitary crow ever sentinel
Ahead of me on a bare branch, the vale below
...

“Sapper John Lane, from Staffordshire,
father of four, reporting for duty, Sir.
Married man. Occupation: miner.
I’m here to kill the Minotaur.”
...

Inside the resealed jar, Hope
turned quiescent in darkness,
folded her butterfly-wings
above her back, hid her
...

I’ll bear with death as a going to ground
A bunkering-down, an embracing of loam,
My skull in the yew’s root. Weeds on my mound
Are heralds bringing a prodigal home.
...

Weed-flesh, wind-wracked, unbleeding
Clumped and kicked along the strand.
The stench and slickness of it;
Holdfasts clench like claws.
...

Black and haloed, my spiller of gold,
Stark and hallowed as a gilded ghost,
Raptured rhymer of the honeyed throat,
Pert proclaimer of embodied thought,
...

I could only speak in the sweet ironies of repetition,
So when he said, “Do not touch me, ” I replied:
“Touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me, ” and
After a while again, “touch me”, till he turned
...

The vale is wakening, but up here
the fringe of the downs skulks
under clouds. Butterflies sleep,
their vacant eyes jewelled with dew;
...