Local Spirits

A waltz of flat earth,
the farmlands rise in the fens.

The sun backlights the bare trees, weak gold 
cleansing each life 
of sawtooth replication.

Only crows
attend, their ratcheting sleekness a fuss
of wings, where totem straw men decompose.
...

The life we lived is past. Each spasm treat 
and bagged-quail flutter 
focuses the mind on whatever else remains. 
Years unwind in deadbeat witness 
to their own conceit. 

Memory circles in the updraft, a memory 
cut deep with summer’s sobriquet. 
 	 	 	
All we wanted was to live 
without regrets, the odds of salmon at the waterfall 
as good as any here, the lives we swore 
would test horizons and signify a door 
was opening, a bolting meson drawn 
freehand.
...

Before the genes 
were sub-let, clauses for the Übermensch 
to covet, other moments mattered.

This is our inheritance. 

No confidential chemical repairs  
the switch, the synapse haywire 
with romance. 

As with our turning to the sun, and by 
again, life’s little matters nudge affairs 
between the acid and the alkali.

Love comes to this, 
the high dive
in the sunny pool and then a stillness, 
to live as though we waited to exist, 
expected somewhere, to dance 
and dance and dance, outside, the black car 
waiting when we go. 
...
 	 	 	
The tug of Newton’s creature keeps 
the gods 
within their woozy orbits. 

If I choose, 
the door is opened and the world takes place, 
not real but real enough, an interface 
of software, boredom, and between us 
space reprogrammed 
as a substitute for grace. 

The great Khan ruled the world, 
and nothing more 
is known. His reservoir of bully genes 
engages now and then,
a half-life core 
of wild boys breaking horses, of tent ropes 
still knotted a certain way, and the means
to taste the dust and name its isotopes.
...
	
All moments are retrieved 
in time, the door 
bricked-over still a door, the year it took 
chiselled in the inglenook. 
The lintel twists with numerals, the four 
walls buckling with crookbacked joists 
until ghosts hang homeless 
in the lurching levels. 

A simple light is woven 
through the walls, 
and resonates until the room 
achieves a frequency more in common
with leaves of hand-built verses 
than those of awls and bevels. 

Perfect planes of featheredge 
electrons folded with the sand and lime
transform, where superstrings 
of tatty time cohere, 
dimensions dazzle, then
disappear into a future physics.
...

The life line in your hand, what fortune tells 
in nebulae, cold-sweat dreams 
the sibyl renders into riddles, the world 
made new 
in each response, the Zen sky’s empty fire 
consumes its absent tenant. Pentecost 
and Elvis cult, all, heave with our desire.

Still, bravado proves 
a meagre codicil 
to all we were. 
...

A native climate, the familiar street 
that leads from home 
to everywhere, 
the lessons here infer an afterlife where stars 
respond with barcode poses, test card
patterns of the ghost 
within the mains.

But a day of journeys is one day, 
the life we make of it 
one life.

This is our inheritance, once
the oldest season is upon us, against 
the crumble-glass brightness of fields in frost, crows 
and dry stalks, the clouds
without direction
or remorse.

The heartbeat slows to winter’s pace,
the names our shadows memorised
before we came.

Estil Pollock | Watchman
Contents | Mudlark No. 80 (2024)