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Howard Wright

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Vertigo

i 
Kindred gorse burnt in the last week
by woodkerne makes the air hurt and close
with heat and ash; the rose-bay on a broad front
like an army stubborn in advance,
the undergrowth embers of blackened bones,

hindquarters, forelegs of errant cavalry
outflanked on the shank of the mountain,
banners of smoke, streaming these long days,
both a clearance and a warning…

ii 
Where the wolf stood, now we stand
with everything before us except a future.

The angled, fractured city is a clinking blanket
of crockery bundled up, awkwardly held,
when the meal is over and the talk run out.

iii 
We think there are places we know:
bridges with rivers up to their armpits;
the factories, schools, wards in their green pockets,
their bright flat swards like spaces tacked on,
because it isn’t lives we think of; anything but.

iv 
We just make the summit. Others have walked here
so long ago they have fallen into history.
None among us promises to come back.

Howard Wright lectures in Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Ulster, Belfast. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland and Cyphers. His first collection, King of Country, is in preparation at Blackstaff Press.

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