Giles Watson Poems

'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?
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1.

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

There's a way of ripping Roman flesh
that only ravens can do. You take
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Last winter, incendiaries ignited
A bloom of flame in your bedroom,
And the gramophone gouged
Through ‘Lili Marlene’ one last time
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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.
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Sometimes the flayed things have spirits.

When my husband is drunk in bed, I go down
to the cellar to find them, their stripped
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Leaning over a stone bridge, knowing
Daubenton’s bats slept
beneath me, wrapped in leather,
pollard willows, white clouds
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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.
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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
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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.
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