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;
...