The Year - a sonnet sequence
1. The Descent
i. October
Trees are being burned-up yellow and red.
Timber boughs, that were always there, are now
beginning to show. Adonis is wounded.
The sun is going down.
Glossy rooks bounce at the road edges,
like living gargoyles, excitedly
stamping the drops that hang in the hedges.
Branches grow bony.
Last night a boy fell into the city’s river,
the brown water fast in spate. Trying to win
something back, the mothers gather
on the bridge, throwing flowers, effigies, that spin
downstream. The low light is gone almost.
The rooks have flown to roost.
ii. November
The rooks have flown the fields, leaving
their tangled nests in bare trees.
Autumn has finished burning
Flakes of wet leaves
cover the ground like doused ash.
The bonfires are stacked. Newspaper-stuffed
figures are carried out across soggy grass.
Wood is set to fire, under the soft
and silent bodies. The fire’s snapping fingers go
climbing through limbs, breaking them into light.
Embers lurch and glow
above our heads. and through the night
the birds shuffle restless to come
to jab and collect up the bits cold now like bone
iii. December
cold collected up again from
where he hung at a bend in the river snagged
in bushes then pulled free by the strong
water leaving the shirt filled and bagged
in the current did the flowers follow
him all this way? have the flowers gone
past him? no
flowers no garlands and he sings no song
as the current delivers him to a new town no
breath bloodless skin
around dead arms fingers come cold to
the side of a boat thin
silver tongues lapping at his muddy
mouth the wind picks up over the estuary
iv. January
over the estuary wind picks
up sound of geese flying
through the night frantic
repetition a guttural gawk gawking
mantra and now laborious
soft hammer of wings beating
over houses the ragged V points like a compass
arrow eastward the airship sun is rising
again electric hisses along wires along
nerves you’re waking up binary
signals flick their off on
pulse code in your eyelids Persephone?
a train roars past the gardens birds spilling
from the hawthorn and the earth is left shaking
v. February
shaking from hawthorn
like last mayflower snow
came and starts to turn
melting in the grass the way daisies grow
in patches
I listen to gulls over
the graveyard rusty hinges
snipping at the dead white I remember
the flowers in the train station
I watch her coming up the cold concrete
stairs ascending from the cavern-
dark platforms and out into the street
and the sunlight and the people
suddenly she is gone untraceable
vi. March
untraceable the snow has gone
the ground has thawed geese slope down
over the marsh tired of that long
sea resting between brown
reeds A baby was born, last night.
Tor, the rocky
summit; Tor, the word of geese in flight;
Tor, the gull’s squeal; Tor, the point of epiphany.
Outside, a magpie rattled in a tree;
its iridescent gun-metal head twitching.
And the late sky, cracked clouds, moved like the sea.
It was like being deep underwater, watching
the moon and the city’s pin-prick lights undo
themselves on the surface, breaking up into blue.
2. The Ascent
i. April
Breaking on to the blue surface
like fractures, the trees show
signs of resurrection; the lace
of last year’s leaves is blown low
across the dirt. Around the graveyard,
splinters of new shoots fill
the beech-hedges like hard
brown thorns. Anemones spill
their bright guts through the woods.
‘I went north by train, hammering and creaking
over the Fenlands, between floods
that covered fields with a steely-silver rippling
past the shaggy silhouette of a cormorant stretching
its wings to dry, and I was glad to be moving’
ii. May
‘I was glad to find the ground dry.
This was no train; I had crossed the Styx,
rowed through the dark by
a ferryman who fixed
his single milky eye on me, heavy
like a hand. From the cold station I saw
light and heard the city
and I knew I had been here before.
I caught a taxi and passed a wedding
just come out under an arch
of thrown petals, and a flock of pigeons beating
wide circles over the church.
And I cried, and downy leaves opened,
and I cried, and crumpled butterflies opened.’
iii. June
You saw the butterfly that went flitting
past me as I stood at your window. But you never
saw how I, with my back facing
your bed, turned away from the corner
of your illness, how I found a single dry wing
laid among the dust on the window-ledge. And,
thinking suddenly of your skin,
I went to stroke it with a fingertip. My hand
shook, and I watched it crumble away.
I regret telling you. I regret not changing
that vase of yellow carnations when they
started to brown. I watch the sun rising
beyond this new window, over a row
of chimneys that you will never know.
iv. July
The indomitable factory chimneys
stand black on the horizon; our
colossus at the edge of the city.
The towering column of steam catches fire
with the sinking sun, and clouds burn
like dry mountains miles in the distance.
Nothing has changed. The earth turns
on its axis. Yes, we had a defiant hero once.
He stood on the bridge with his camera, ready to take
something back for us. The click of the shutter,
a tremble across the skyline. The minute earthquake
tipped him and he fell, breaking on the road, under
the sound of traffic and wind-buffeted, circling gulls.
The factory stays in silhouette, like a temple.
v. August
O he tried so hard to make this house a temple
in your name. But now you are left to stay
here alone, having been unable
to repair him and his days, or even say
what was wrong. Poor Tom’s a-cold.
Poor Tom’s a martyr. Found himself in the docks
of a courtroom, where they told
him all he was, and, with white face, they took
his trembling arm. Past his father, and you,
the two men led him underground,
locked him in a cell. And through
the drains and sewers came the long sound
of his animal-singing. Poor Tom’s
asleep. His mind is gone.
vi. September
Finally, you fell asleep. And somewhere
geese threw their wings open
and stamped over the water. And I tried to scare
the magpies that came to your garden
for two days after you died, but they always
came back. Eventually I had to leave them too,
their hoarse rattle, closing in over the day’s
last stubborn blackbird as it ran through
its summer scales. I left wearing one of your
shabby coats; I didn’t think it would fit.
The lock tutted as I closed the front door.
What could I do? I can change none of it;
the old king must die in the end, carried
through trees that turn again, yellow and red.
Page(s) 18-23
magazine list
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