Michael Symmons Roberts

Masked, gloved, brush tucked flat
against her back, faint with heat

this vixen is silent at soirees,
attentive to talk of defence, the public purse.

Emissary from the wild woods, agent
from the other side, she shakes her head

at wine, at canapés, she gags on human
stench, their meat and sweat.

When taxis come, she slips through kitchens,
drops to all fours (still in black tie),

sprints along the back streets
like a feral duke until she meets the edgelands

where - rubbed on the shuck of a tree -
her man-skin peels off

like a calyx and the sleek red flower unfurls.
Tongue drinks in the cold,

nose down in leaf mould, deep rush and tow
of attachment, of instinct. I, the only witness,

take this for a resurrection (body sloughed
and after-life as fox-soul), so I watch

in awe and slow my breath until
she catches sight and howls and howls.
...

I found the world's pelt
nailed to the picture-rail
of a box-room in a cheap hotel.

So that's why rivers dry to scabs,
that's why the grass weeps every dawn,
that's why the wind feels raw:

the earth's an open wound,
and here, its skin hangs
like a trophy, atrophied beyond all

taxidermy, shrunk into a hearth rug.
Who fleeced it?
No record in the guest-book.

No-one paid, just pocketed the blade
and walked, leaving the bed
untouched, TV pleasing itself.

Maybe there was no knife.
Maybe the world shrugs off a hide
each year to grow a fresh one.

That pelt was thick as reindeer,
so black it flashed with blue.
I tried it on, of course, but no.
...

So, God takes your child by the hand
and pulls her from her deathbed.
He says: ‘Feed her, she is ravenous.'

You give her fruits with thick hides
- pomegranate, cantaloupe -
food with weight, to keep her here.

You hope that if she eats enough
the light and dust and love
which weave the matrix of her body

will not fray, nor wear so thin
that morning sun breaks through her,
shadowless, complete.

Somehow this reanimation
has cut sharp the fear of death,
the shock of presence. Feed her

roast lamb, egg, unleavened bread:
forget the herbs, she has an aching
fast to break. Sit by her side,

split skins for her so she can gorge,
and notice how the dawn
draws colour to her just-kissed face.
...

If this is a fracture across time and place,
where past and future hold each other's gaze,

then should the world not call a moment's halt,
not hang like a fly-cloud at head-height

when a downpour ends? Should it not let
fireworks burst, then hold their sculpted light?

Then we will see the glory of this wild,
this liberated city, where everyone is held

in green, red, gold of roman-candle arcs
and rocket seed-heads. We walk

among the rescued in their newly crowded bars.
A couple caught mid-kiss across

their table, waiter balanced on one foot
with eyes of steel and arms of plates.

A self-appointed prophet in a shirt and tie
gapes, fish-like, caught halfway through a lie.

I could lean and wet my fingertip
in stilled champagne, tilted on a singer's lip.

You could grab a smoke ring from the ether
between punters and the pole dancer,

pocket it as proof, then we could take the air
beside the float-glass river,

where a busker rests her bow on a string,
and you ask what are all these flesh-ghosts thinking?

Far from a cheap trick, this city-wide hiatus,
the cost per minute is prohibitive.

We barely linger in this midnight space
before words rush back, before kiss meets kiss.
...

Geneticist as driver, down the gene
codes in, let's say, a topless coupe
and you keep expecting bends,

real tyre-testers on tight
mountain passes, but instead it's dead
straight, highway as runway,

helix unravelled as vista,
as vanishing point. Keep your foot
down. This is a finite desert.

You move too fast to read it,
the order of the rocks, the cacti,
roadside weeds, a blur to you.

Every hour or so, you pass a shack
which passes for a motel here:
tidy faded rooms with TVs on

for company, the owner pacing out
his empty parking lot. And after
each motel you hit a sandstorm

thick as fog, but agony.
Somewhere out there are remnants
of our evolution, genes for how

to fly south, sense a storm,
hunt at night, how to harden
your flesh into hide or scales.

These are the miles of dead code.
Every desert has them.
You are on a mission to discover

why the human heart still slows
when divers break the surface,
why mermaids still swim in our dreams.
...