from BARDO

The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way our umbilicus.

Is it a consolation that the stuff of which we’re made

is star-stuff too?


– That wherever you go you can never fully disappear –

dispersal only: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen.


Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.


Roselle Angwin

Saturday 6 April 2013

River Suite (2) - section 1

 








1



you find yourself here again

as if in dream



this bleak bog

black and ochre home to cotton grass and kestrels

shaped flints, a sheep's skull



in the absences where small deaths press

(scatter of fleece like dirty snow

a spike of bone, a tangled wreath of feather and sinew)



where the winds prowl

where the buzzard's cry falls through space

and there's no ear but your own to catch it                



easy to believe you're at the edges of the earth

that you might forget your name

and no-one to call it




here darkness waits close at hand

shadowing the day

the way a nightmare tracks you

  
just a tangle of voices

(you shiver)

maybe the long dead criss-crossing the heavy air

tinners hunters tribesmen

whose lives have littered this land

for thousands of years



flesh become bog cotton, mouse and mud





or a wild baying like the hounds of hell



your own fear following you

like a grey wolf

ghosting your footsteps

  



here where the heart of Devon clenches tight

and squeezes out its rivers

like arteries clotted with granite



Dart and Tavy

Teign and Taw and Ockment

opening from the earth's dark magma

like creases in the palm of a hand



  
we are made of all this

peat-bog and granite

slate and the soft red sandstone that yields to the sea's caress



water




you're unwinding these stories

down from the iron-black night of the moor





© Roselle Angwin & Vikky Minette, 2010/13 



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