Eleanor Hooker

Since we nail
wings to the dead,
she calls ravens
from the sky
to inspect our work. "For flight,"
they say, "first remove their boots."

She leans in,
inspects a fresh hex
behind my eyes,
takes my feet
and lays them on the fire,
to burn it out, roots first.

We're the last,
babička and me.
We've survived on
chance and bread
baked from the last store of grain.
And as we're out of both,

we will die soon.
They are gathering
in the well.
We disrobe.
She hums whilst I nail her wings,
she tells me a tale, her last gift —

"This dark stain,
passed kiss to kiss-stained
fevered mouth,
blights love, is pulsed
by death-watch beetle's
tick, timing our decay.

They know this.
They wait by water,
gulping despair.
The ravens keep watch,
they say the contagion's here,
they promise to take us first."

Her tale done,
we go winged and naked
to the well.
We hear them
climbing the walls, caterwauling,
but ravens are swift, and swoop.
...

for John & Fedelma Tierney
I have one marble only, glass-curled greens and blue.
It's kept inside a golden globe with turquoise studs,
I swing it from a chain: my dowsing stone, my truth-seer.
Once it knocked against an ancient head, cracked it so its walnut core

leaked sepia images of a being lived inside another time, another age,

before the image replaced the real and the real was more than shadow.

Outside the cave I glassed the play of light and shadow,
and when my only marble fell from its golden globe onto a blue
tiled ocean floor, I swam after. The ancient head, wise with age,
told me he had too lost his, recalled the studs

inside the coloured orb, their curled blues, their seedy core

his own two eyes: Learian days that left him sightless and a seer.

My ancient friend dismissed the lies of a mummer seer

whose falsest claim is that to love someone is to dispossess him of his shadow,
to wipe out every trace of him. Is this not indeed a murderous future? Our core

belief that we are sworn to good and not extremes is not illusory. Those blue-

eyed boys in ivory towers profess there is no truth, no self, nothing's real; the studs

that breed such suasive tales are only there to fill the storybooks of our age.

Along the furrows of my brow I found a little pebble, it seemed an age
since I had lost my marble. This purple stone weighed but a fraction of a seer.
It rattles in the golden globe, its hollow ring dislodging all the turquoise studs.
In the desert of the real, we watched the sun expand and then contract my shadow.
The ancient head has none. Though he is dead, we still talk. When the moon is blue
and the sky is starry nights, we harvest all the fruits of happy thoughts and core

them for their seeds. ‘Is all of speech deception, all meaning at its core
inherently unsound?' I asked the wise old head. He'd reached an age,
he said, and no longer feared such things, was satisfied there were no blue-
prints or master schemes, simple truths apply - it does not take a seer
to tell you that the darkest hour is just before the dawn. All of us are shadow-
dancing but mustn't let the darkness intercept the light. The mettle studs

he riveted to the heart of my resolve are turquoise studs

in reinforced solutions. I've made up two new moulds, hollowed out their core

for curled glass in colours of the universe, whose negatives in shadow

graphs are images of beings lived inside another time, another age,
before I was madder than unreason and he mapped inscape as a seer
and gladness had another view, before betrayal choked intentions blue.

Talk on this blue-green sphere sets the lens within our glass-eye studs,
through which the seer sees us stumble through the worth of words, in that core
bewitchment of every age, that cannot tell the real from dancing shadow.
...

I kept my appointment with Rain.
We met in the wrong room. Upstairs.
Rain was . . . melancholy. She rinsed
a naked bulb that hung itself
on white wire. It ran out of light,
she said, spreading her fall
from the rooms unfathomed sky.

Rain enquired if I'd brought questions.
I was allowed four. Four only.
Before I could deny it, she pressed
her sodden lips to mine.
Not now, she said. They are come.

The sash windows unlaced their gowns
so that ghost ships, dragging nets
filled with memories absolved
by Rain, could sail through them.

And as we watched, Rain said,
These are your questions:
Why is it they hide in there?
Why is it they turn from me?
Is it to the same place they go?
And is it the same story they weather?

Rain said, There is no tenderness
in the absence of joy, and, in the absence
of joy, even songbirds squabble.

When there was nothing left to say,
Rain enveloped me; her hair lay on my face
like tears, and inside my closed mouth,
hummingbirds flew backwards into my throat.
...

I went inside a clock. My dæmon
unlocked the back, told me to take
my time as he laced me into my snow
boots. Nervous, I almost forgot the present.

In the Blizzard Room, snow globes
bloomed on icicle spears. A Mammoth
nudged a blown orb along a frozen gully.
Preserved inside the glass was my old schoolroom.
Chalk flakes dusted the gaping floorboards,
and huddled beneath the timbers
were my classmates, petrified and silent.

My dæmon took me by the hand
and led me to the Room of Rankings;
a parched, outside-inside plot. Ladders
fixed in caked earth, leaned against a
bruising sky. My dæmon said, a bruising sky
has beaten, it can no longer assure the stars,
let us go from here. So we left it to its shame.

In the Lens Room, the clock face turned
to watch us. At the centre of the chamber
I hummed my tuneless rhyme, and from one wall
my little girl stepped out of time, she clutched
my tattered present. You mustn't hold on, let her go now,
let her be, my dæmon said as I drew her close.
...

Solitary. She's been around for so long now, we simply
co-exist. I know she's there. At night she rocks in the left
corners of our bedroom; her chair held together with my fear
of the dark. She stays there, mostly, in the dark. Sometimes,
she sleeps at the bottom of the lake. She wakes me in my dreams
and I ignore her, but then she does her special trick; hovers just
above me, her weight not on me. I spoon up to you, ‘I'm frightened,' I say,
‘mind me'. And you warm me not to tell. My dreams, they frighten
you too. I won't look at her; I know she could never be unseen, unheard of,
for ever and ever.
...