Deryn Rees-Jones Poems

I've learnt to run, like an adult learns to sing,
the arpeggios of the body's muscles,
the biomechanics of the human scale,
forcing a life to be suddenly spoken,
a finger pressed to an ivory key, a note that issues
from an opened mouth, as if God or the gods
were already there, endorphins pulsing through the system,
the body's flux when contained in movement,
your hard-earned place in the world
on hold; I've learnt to take tarmac under my shoe,
to feel the spark between muscle and sinew
pushing the globe on its tilted axis,
the rib cage and its nesting heart,
ventricular walls and the pump of oxygen,
the flexion-extension of shoulder and arm
as you travel through light and a briskness of shadow,
suddenly animal, curious, terrible,
just for a moment never-grown old. . . .

It's the cemetery I run through now,
the snow-littered pathways of ordered mayhem,
the furnishings of its strange allotment,
recording angels, bears, dogs, gnomes,
a broken vase, a fading wreathe, a votive candle
snow's snuffed out, Our Lady of Suburbia,
a rosary entwined in sculpted fingers,
propped beside a smiling Buddha, a paper blue
chrysanthemum wilting in his hand.

Yet, through the wreckage of doggerel,
on marble, on granite, through the hum of cars
on the circling road, through the cool swathes of air
on this mist-hung morning,
a blackbird opens its feathery throat
pulling the sky and skyline closer
so hedgerow and barbed wire and railing,

the crunch of my footsteps on glistening paths,
rise up together, clash and unite,

when suddenly I stumble, hit the ground,
become myself stretched out among the graves,
the frost, a plot of orange dirt. Slumped beside me
shouldered by a gravestone,
ice keeping death alive, a woman's ruined body,
pierced with an arrow like a fallen bird.
What is it like to know death so slowly,
hair and fingernails still growing
like Lizzie Siddall's in the grave?
What is it like — the presence of absence —
the space you keep in that clenched right hand?

It's a body I know from snapshots, old albums
carrying histories, other lives, other selves.
William and Mara. Mara and Will.
There at the mouth, carved like a seraph's,
a dash, a dart, an outpost of blood.
Her eyes are ash-pits in saintly expression
like Christ's on the cross in an incense-fuelled church,
or that woman of sorrows — the mother, the lover—?
a flash like lightning in her crow-dark hair.

I think of her now, the twist of flesh
on her stripped lean torso, remember a smile,
a forthright look. I pick myself up
and my stomach retches;
I dizzy, double over, then throw up.
The movie I'm in is black and white.
I note an absence of birdsong, the moan of the thaw.
Then the soundtrack arrests.
Was I wrong, then, I wonder, remembering this,
how a voice from on high chastens us, comforts us.

Everything's still.
...

The night would not give in to me —
or something inside me would not yield.
The great harness of love I was wearing
stiffened in my shoulders, was held like a bit
between my teeth.
Last night
I woke and the moon was there,
her old romance of self-reliance and inconstancy.
And though my children in their turn
woke up to frantic dreams, were held,

brought back to bed,
she was there, her face full with a fierce singing.

And the dark again became a place
of sleep, a wild thing cohabiting.
...

On sunny days, his shirtsleeves rolled
he'd cover with a sticking plaster
like the wound of Welsh he wouldn't give his children
the blue-green inks of anchorage, the shame.
...

'Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!' E.B.
I go to sleep with the taste of you, and this is not the first time

for you are too much with me. And these are your hands,
in the darkness. This is the rough shape of
your face, only. Your hair, your ear, your thigh.
And then, out of nowhere, your tongue like a hot little fish
a blue fish, glinting electrics,
a fish accustomed to basking, I suppose,
in the clear hot waters of some tropical isle.
Not an ordinary fish, not a fish I could haul from the waters, or not easily.
Not a fish accustomed to travelling in solitude,
but one used to a rainbow accompaniment,
one used to the sea's depths, and her sulky harbourings.
One used to the rockpools and the undertow, the colour of sands.
And, how suddenly you swam into me!
And was it your mouth, or the memory of your mouth?
Or was it a fish? Whatever it was, it was there.
There in the bloodstream, bruising artery, vein,
as it swam,
heading, no doubt, for the heart.
Then you stopped it,
for you knew it would have killed me,
and it basked in the blue pools of my elbow, where you
stroked it for a while;
then you asked it to dart, from my hips up my spine,
you asked it to wander to the tilt of my breastbone
where tickled, like a salmon, it leapt
it leapt;
you asked it to journey from my shoulder to my neck, to that soft place
behind my ears
where you solemnly forbade it, asked it instead to
rest for a while, and then turn back,
saying Fish, fish, my brilliant fish
and somehow I can't
remember now

on the furthermost tip of my tongue, like a dream.
...

Is a lazy god, and all promises.
He says he will never leave,
Was a long time coming
With swallows in his air -
Petulant, weeping.

Waking early one morning
I watch him from the bedroom window
Barefoot on the grass,
Stalking the garden and beside himself
With all the brilliant flowers.

With soft, dry hands he soothes their heavy heads.
My children's books, too,
That were carelessly left on the lawn all night,

Unread and ruined by the rain.
...