Giles Watson Poems

1.

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

'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?
...

1. Morrigan

There's a way of ripping Roman flesh
that only ravens can do. You take
...

Last winter, incendiaries ignited
A bloom of flame in your bedroom,
And the gramophone gouged
Through ‘Lili Marlene’ one last time
...

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.
...

Sometimes the flayed things have spirits.

When my husband is drunk in bed, I go down
to the cellar to find them, their stripped
...

Leaning over a stone bridge, knowing
Daubenton’s bats slept
beneath me, wrapped in leather,
pollard willows, white clouds
...

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.
...

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
...

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.
...