A FOX THOUGHT

For Ted Hughes

 

I imagine a landscape of your poems:

A sacred wood, a pagan burial ground

Where the eyes of wildlife blood red

devour prey.  Surrounded by darkness

of gothic tales.  Cold moons fall on

a perpetual November sky.

 

Winter soil on your chalk white flesh

Deep in the womb of your savage earth.

 

The nonchalant delight of you toil, free

from the vulva noose.  That something

else is alive unseen, black velvet feathers

oiled in crude sway within black rainbows

And peck your birds-eye tomb vision.

 

Rain from a broken gutter spout, your poems

Gush with cold delight, the purification

Of a stagnant well.

THE BIRDS BEE’S TREES IN ME

 

The trees are within me

They sway, bend and bow.

I am like the evergreen leaf

That climbs so dark in green

On blue and grey that fills

My day with light and dark

And light, it fills my day with

Things to say that roll off

 of my tongue.

 

I am but a stinging fly that

Leaves it mark on life.  I’ll

Scar your heart and hurt

Your head in these words

That I say.  You will search

Your mind while the world

Winds me astray.  The birds

 

Fly into the wind but blows

Back to bend and bow, the world

Winds and lets us know, soon we

Will find its purpose will be beneath

 the trees standing firm to grow.

The black and white bird

Sat on the roof, preening

In a melancholic nonchalance

Just being black and white.

 

The people in the house

Were up and down, the teen-

Age girl was praying to a re-

Flection in the mirror, the dad

Seen himself on the news.

 

The bird flew away into empty sky

 

This pome cuts through language

Like a high dose antidepressant.

There is no such thing as depression

Just a depressed life.  What do you do

If you’re done, a shell without memory

No thing to cling on to, how do you be-

Come a cling on if your mind is full

Of emptiness.