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Poetry

Vixen

 

and there

through this Japanese ghost garden

this monochrome dreamscape

slips a half-dreamt wraith

 

born from the last shades of dusk

she is tip tip toeing on footfall so soft

it uncurls snails

dizzies galaxies in dew

 

her vagabond heart

beats with the tremors of the earth

balances on owl call

and the breeze rushing the trees

 

behind her swim timorous worlds

we can never enter

 

so slight and swift she moves

that without the moon billowing through

the cherry and all the fallen blossom

luminous as snow

I would not see her

 

 

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Vitulus

 

1

He suckled. He grazed.

Grasses, buttercups, a mash of nameless leaves

and stems foaming on his eely tongue.

He had the whole Sky as his mother,

the Earth as his soul.

 

2

The blade works from throat to tail:

spill and tumble, organs a muddle of bloody parcels

unfolding onto stone, slick and remote.

 

His tongue hangs from the slack jaw.

How his eyes show shock and sky

in their shine.

 

3

We soak the skin in lime, prod it down with staffs.

It rises and looms, settles.

Our eyes smart and burn in the haze.

 

Eight days gone, we haul out its pale slap,

nail it to a frame, scrape the last fine hairs away.

A skim of fat gathers on the blade.

 

Limed and scudded, the pelt dries and stiffens;

a map of paths wandering virgin terrain.

 

4

The world is drawn inside your skin,

its pale parchment shrinking at light;

the endless raking of the lunellum remembered

in its translucence.

 

Undulations appear over time; a shift

in the landscape. A memory of green:

soilburst of shoots ruckling the meadow

below your hooves.

 

 

Note: The Hereford Mappa Mundi was drawn on a single calf skin.

 

 

LINKS to online poems:

https://wildcourt.co.uk/new-work/2759/

http://www.theamericanjournalofpoetry.com/v6-lovell.html

https://www.terrain.org/2019/poetry/jane-lovell/

http://www.hoppermag.org/la-selune

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