Send and receive
extracts from a sonnet sequence
Thinking of Hardy’s loops of white worsted
netting birds to Dorset from icy wastes,
I send my words out on the web in code,
little bleeps of electricity which burst
on your screen in Africa while you paste
a foot wrapped in a rag along the road
then mark and cut. Our words ravel the air:
I’m safe. There was no bomb. Re-routed planes
track a sloping dash across our view,
the underlining of a signature.
Ink is rare, erotic: his open Gs, plain
Ts, your righthand copperplate, blue-black Qs,
her leftleaning elegance. By now you know
I am all right. These words may be for show.
*****
I am all right. These words may be for show
because tap tap be cautious they record.
Hiking in the mountains is euphemistic
sex, not a clear blue climb up through snow.
Draft: by my daughter’s age, they ‘d moored
this small girl’s father to a log and kicked
him down the river in the springtime floods.
She‘d seen her mother raped by five of them.
She dresses in print cotton frocks. She wrote
her story for my daughter, words of blood
my girl‘s too young to know: delete. Send:
I went out to the island on my neighbour’s boat.
The prawns are delicious. The saltfish is good.
I cannot tell her everything I should.
*****
I cannot tell her everything I should.
The plane was banking down towards us
and we ran. They have taken my stem cells.
My brother would be tested if he could
stop his medication without a fuss.
They say the markers in my blood will tell
something of the future like the stars
I read each day in smudgy tabloid columns
or clicking through Mystic Maisie’s vision.
The river‘s swallowed bridges, closed the bars.
A woman in a tree let loose a solemn
wrinkled boy we’ve sent off to a mission
where the water is no higher than your feet,
but flies are eating the one red sack of meat.
Page(s) 33
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