Jen Hadfield

Flinching in my hands
this soiled and studded but good heart,
which stippling my cupped palms, breathes -

a kidney flinching on a hot griddle,
or very small Hell's Angel, peeled from the verge
of a sweet, slurred morning.

Drunk, I coddle it like a crystal ball,
hellbent the realistic mysteries
should amount to more than guesswork

and fleas.
...

I paint the low hill until I admit
to how the light is on it.
Morning's coldest - working in thermals
and fleeces and socks in triplicate -
a lugworm, bundled bait
for the sky with the thunder-grey roe.

How is the light on the low hill now?
Blood through skin.
Once or twice a day sun opens the vein and
white is white of seagulls - sour Messiahs!
- then another two hundred
of Tommy's rainstained fleeces.

.

I said to Tommy (shifting stone)
whatcha doing and he said
playing at Nelson Mandela
what does it look like?

.

The layby's up for it, grips
your car, windows mossed with thin damp.
Headlamps chuck out sticky webs to slide
from the windscreen and your black/bright forehead.
Headlamps - grasses giant
and shrinking - and us knotted in the hill's hair.

Now you turn the key and the gate's sudden
red iron - the last moment we've netted.
You've picked a soundtrack, you want
to say to keep it light, don't get attached
('no angel') and I want to shock you agreeing
yeh keep it light
and I can carry you a while. For a day or two
I'll have this cumulus bruise (your passing weather)
on my lower lip.

.

Up here it turns out it's less simple
a ewe's fleece
stained by the season of her last tup.
...

You want to look on the lea-side
in winter, the swamp thickening
like the uterine wall,
popping its puffballs
and creaming its butterwort,
folding in the sundew and squill,
putting out the eyebrights.

You ask what they do
for accommodation -
try high pools
in the red hills
of winter,
hind-paws slapping up flares
of red rain -
look for their niche
of collapsing peat.

Pilgrims of such
an ascetic order
don't even own
the spectral colours
of snow.

No, that's the white flag
at Amen Corner.

That's your heart going
nineteen-
to-the-dozen.

That's just the cold water
stilling itself
in the form
of your throat.
...

Stay out of the sun:
we can all see you. Stop picking fights
above your weight. We've this high

golden bowl of heather and moss
company of whaups and cries and
mutters in the wind; the long

draught of islands

and blinding sea.

Shelter in the hoodoos and pluck
your fur - fine smelt caught on heather
and shining reeds -

ruing it as I do, this flying
gleaming floss snatched back
and spent by the wind.

Freeze when the sunlight hits you

you're not invisible. Scratch off

your dreamcoat of silver money.
Rest downwind in the sun. Run
double-jointed when the valley dims.
...

‘No metaphors swarm

around that fact, around that strangest thing,
that being that was and now no longer is.'
Iain Crichton Smith


I

For it is not like a sea of nested gas
that you float upon
in your pedalo.

This unspeakable is not like
anything

a poem or riddle collies no particle
of it for us to fank
in mouths and minds.

A noun's a nickname
and makes it reestit

adjectives salt, parch and wizen it.
Language abdicates

but you
in your stocking feet
stand a chance

with your long-lost primer
of liquids and vowels.


II

Loving language is wide
and shallow: sooks, polches
and wistens it.

Already I can only noun
about its shores
and surfaces

nym the brinks of this squilly thing

where congregates stuff
that can be likened:

stiff hands like ginger root
in the dim, summer night;

the kettle's glossy coat of tar;
the little flame of the driftwood fire

bunched
and clerical.


III

First we'll need
to agree:

are we taking up the first language
or must we coin
a new one?

If we're going to speak about this
I'll need a tinderbox and tent
and waterskin.

We will need to use the nights
as fully as the nesting birds.
...

Hold the bird in the left hand, and commence
to pull off the feathers from under the wing.
Having plucked one side, take the other wing
and proceed in the same manner, until all the feathers
are removed.
- Mrs Beeton's Household Management



I raise Paisley wounds,
spill yellow pollen of fat.
This is reversing time, like a vandal

who scores shellac blooms
from a soundbox, tightening to snapping
the strings of a lute.

As if I scraped a poem's lard
from vellum. As brattish
as kicking a cat.

In pale skin are magnolia buds:
the muscles that worked wings,
but I've undone the wings,

gripping each pinion
as if to slide home the marriage ring
and never dream of flying again;

I've plucked the eyed, seed feathers,
the chicky down, the fine human hair
like first casing of mushroom spawn,

the long quills that striped across
the evening sun this week,
trembling in the rainstorm's target.
...

The going
is a moon-walk
over springy terraces
of ice-shattered rock, riddled
with arctic scramblers,
bearberry and minute
mountain azalea, sunspots
through fog, an occasional blaze
of sea below - all
battened down and
buttoned up except
this mushroom, like a piece
of vernacular furniture,
tough droiltin tree
that seems to sprout
from the language of heart
and hearth; massy corbel
of the least willow. It's not
sex I'm trying to get my head
around but what our
flowering costs us
I'm afraid that in this
as ever we spend
beyond our means. Who'd
jut out a poem except
they were in love?
The human way is ever
unsustainable -
whatever we make -
we wax more
and more outlandishly
beautiful until luminous our skin
splits; the scrambling twig
herniates its varnished bole,
well, yes, a gargoyle,
a hard-on.
...

by want -
as in ‘I want you' and

‘I want to write' - I mean
as if the sap in the floorboards candled

and began to flow - bruises freshening
round the cleats and congealed grain

loosening like lava around the nails and knots
to giddy in lees where flour-gold would gather

were floorboards a river


I want -

no wonder the cat skips and shivers
and stares up wildly

into empty corners -

the knots scorch the shirred flesh
in their readiness

to spout scaled limbs -
and are the shape of sparrow's

breasts puffed up against
a snow-strafed wind
...

Who listens
like lichen listens

assiduous millions of black
and golden ears?

You hear

and remember

but I'm speaking
to the lichen.

The little ears prunk,
scorch and blacken.

The little golden
mouths gape.
...

Stay out of the sun:
we can all see you. Stop picking fights
above your weight. We've this high

golden bowl of heather and moss
company of whaups and cries and
mutters in the wind; the long

draught of islands

and blinding sea.

Shelter in the hoodoos and pluck
your fur - fine smelt caught on heather
and shining reeds -

ruing it as I do, this flying
gleaming floss snatched back
and spent by the wind.

Freeze when the sunlight hits you

you're not invisible. Scratch off

your dreamcoat of silver money.
Rest downwind in the sun. Run
double-jointed when the valley dims.
...

Born too soon,
Monday's child was unready to be seen;
is destined to be early for ever.

She's selected a slice of red pepper
shaped
like a question mark.

*

The volcanic breath of Tuesday's child!
He remembers where poetry comes from;
the literal potential of things,

which means he can't eat broccoli -
seeing it right, a tiny indigestible oak.

He eats grated cheese with a teaspoon,
assisting it with a finger.

*

The hidden's the vocation of bird-like Wednesday's child,
perfecting her dust-baths with sweeping boughs of pine.

She can find anything hidden in the dark,
as a cat finds a rabbit -

by steam escaping
the warren.

*

Thursday's child says he saw Wednesday's child
run so fast she began to fly.

Thursday's child shall be called a liar.

*

Friday is afraid of the suit of spades
and jigsaw pieces the shape of the suit of spades.

She's afraid of plug-sockets, pylons,
dams, flowered wallpaper.

She knows what magic is -
the stress we're under.

*

Saturday's child is still growing into her eyes
(lamps above her chin, a frog's eyes surfacing

the muds of winter).
She can't help what she does and doesn't see -

salting away what she sees
inside her.

*

Sunday's child knows what blasphemy is
and where the devil's grave.

He makes the lovely graves
of long grass and speedwell.
...

Something near to true
night-darkness. The children
are playing the Plinky-Boat -
a xylophone made
from a reclaimed yoal -
built for flexibility in a coarse
sea, you can tell it fledged
with ease, just blushed
from boat to instrument,
transpiring streams
of these hoarse night-
notes. For its copper pipes
are cut to breadth exactly
so the boat's beam is
its sotto voce and two rills
of rising pitch run
into stern and stem to
the harmonic of each
hinnyspot - the point
the boards of gunwales
and stem flow together.
I don't know what it is
about this place that things
metaflower so readily
into their present selves.
The instrument's a boat,
the notes unresonant
and discs of thin light
swarm over the pipes
from the boys' headtorches.
Perhaps we heard seals
broaching in the harbour
as they answered the girls'
handclapping game -
I doubt they moaned
in their haunted wise -
here was everything -
words lost, as I'm trying
to say, their echo, that
yodel into past and future.
The poem wouldn't exist,
but we couldn't stay.
...

‘a mystery, and a waste of pain'
Annie Dillard
Inexplicable pain -
you're a thing like Sirius
or Aldebaran - another
asterism of the first magnitude:
remote incandescence -
colour - heat - which degrade
when I regard you with
the naked eye, dazzling
and extinct.

When I consider all
the things you are - the neglect
of pain; a window of slumping glass
between us and the distorted world -
I wish we held you not inside
but near. Jungled

in your orchid
and passionflower,
creepers and bromeliads
of pain, we'd peer through
each other's scintillate leaves.

If we spoke of you at all,
it was ruefully,
to say:

If it flowered
less often, like a cactus,
then I might look forward
to its alien bloom. Still,
when it dies back, I feed
and pot it up.

Or boast I grafted
and grew a great pain
last year, a scion
of the original
stock.
...

The Anglo-Saxons called (May) thrimilce, because
then cows can be milked three times a day.
- Brewer's Phrase and Fable



Cheddared, the light sealed
in rind of dry road;
bloom and sheen of the ditches
I've been dreaming all this life;
the close-quilled irises
rooted dense and deep
as flight feathers.

Recognition rises
- cream in a tilted pitcher.
...

the nightlight angels
the Teasmade angels
the radiant angels bucking

then putting on again the habitual clothes
the High Street angels
the battledress angels

the angels crossing their wings of tin
taking grid-reference
from the angels with walkie-talkies

the interleaved angels
the angels in reins
the angels with webcam stigmata

the mighty cog angels of braid and feather
the pivot Jibreels
the treadmill seraphim

the swinging cross the swaying cross
the rising cross of beaten iron
the angels with reluctant winches

the angels lost in clocks and watches
daydreaming
the angels doubting angels

the angels spitting breath
the angels spitting vodka sorrow
the angels risking juice and water

the thinmilk Bodhisattvas
the hushed, dumpling Bodhissatvas
the angels spitting beak-fed manna

the insomniac angels redrawing lines
the angels carroting urban soil
the angels letting the sky lie fallow

the angels retreating from the woeful steel
the molten chorale

the angels in diaspora
...

NO SNOW FELL ON EDEN
as i remember it - there was no snow,
so no thaw or tao as you say

no snowmelt drooled down the brae;
no human footfall swelled into that of a yeti
baring what it shoulda kept hidden;

no yellow ice choked bogbean;
there were no sheepskulls
in the midden -

it was no allotment, eden -
they had a hothouse,
an orangery, a mumbling monkey;

there was no cabbage-patch
of rich, roseate heads;
there was no innuendo

no sea, no snow
There was nothing funny
about a steaming bing of new manure.

There was nothing funny at all.
Black was not so sooty. No fishboat revolved redly
on an eyepopping sea.

Eve never sat up late drinking and crying.
Adam knew no-one who was dying.
That was yet to come, In The Beginning.
...