John Wilkinson

Four Poems from ‘The Swing’

∆

Syllables! Syllables! My heart is in my mouth, I put

her foot in my mouth, my mouth was stopped, not that this

settled anything.

To be human is a syndrome

& no marker, no, not my tongue can wag that not-dog

kangaroo,

the homeless arm drags,

eye wanders from its orbit.

I lie in bed amidst the trickles & my candle blows out,

tissue thickens & deposits they compress, they seem no

longer mobile, the be-

longing slips away,

the lung congests, say ah,

what memory, what gives?

It is the bat slips its fur.

The flying worm slips its skin.

The angel sheds its light, it is a baby

balanced on the pan against the folds & corrugations,

holding up

a pink pointed shoe, priapic but a sheath for my eye.

Please give me that leeway, I shall take it in my stride.

In its stony roll my eye sinks concealed, foliage is billowing

above this plug, this spile,

& undislodged, unmounting, sinks my eye,

staying all banked flounces, accloying winter

sag & seep down marshy sets & holts,

pressuring cloud to hold formation.

Syllables will not disperse,

light not disperse

through rattling stands, nor boughs

shirk the alleviate air they carry.

∆

Sloppy dust,

underfoot their shapes merge, could they be faun-like,

gather speed, gain an edge, exaggerated

cheek-bones, smoke-ring haloes

wafting spirally: How shall this be? What gives?

Number them like prisoners on the road.

Seal every spark in amber! Globes bob

on recumbent jets, pans are paved with water-lilies,

even the dying sun’s reflection skims the rills & cannot sink,

for it stares into its own steadfast eye

unblinking as dusk promulgates, as limbo fills with

calls this way & that across its marches, with the shrieks

of its shifting populations.

Supposed day

shadows overlap but lunar pull stretches to broad daylight

through the puncture,

swinging to & fro like spotlight’s oval or lily pad or like

an eye-patch. Night

& day confuse as in a tangle of dense undergrowth, as in

bramble & the clearing where returning they swing.

Additional stimuli (wind in the trees)

& prior events

(past experience with predators & wind),

might these send them packing –

hideout

now a tent of winds wherein a foot cannot press the earth

although roots bulge from underneath,

shades drive downward. Future machines

burrow up through gashed turf.

∆

Gleaming scuds across intarsia lids, dots netsuke, splotches

over ebony sticks, ink droppers, variation-free turn-

table bearings, canes

signing air with bravura, moving

oilily against their counterweights, spring-closing doors

opening such beautiful compartments

Come on people, help me out,

‘inhabitants of a very varnished green’

spring forth accoutred –

I didn’t come in regular as regular goes. That was my earlier.

These they clutch: incandescent filament, twisting in its pearl

neck, brass-capped with screw thread, capsule

filled with argon, or a paper-clip

tonguing at its parallels, or velcro

hooks nuzzling into fur, reflective strips

strap her by the ankles securely

– a C1-synthon headset dips into its cradle, a spool

now empty dominates a field as though an omphalos

studs its floppiness

Help me out.

Propelling fearful stuff, mute & conditional, down the chute.

Extract the dying glow

to flood the paper

peony, lily. Dry-point children rummage cherry blossom

for what was stolen from them in the first place, fast spoils.

∆

The shown but unexposed remain opaque & shining, struck

by a sharp flying syllable, nudged by predatory lips,

memory withheld in the storage devices, answer not

a piercing call/ yet how extract flutter out of sycamore,

these are but discarded shells chattering beneath naked feet,

percussion that I move by, between stations. Ice-heavy

oak imaginaries clatter. Though old songs are competent,

forest buries them, the forest just goes to show, not a tree

but dies not, but does not, surely I was reeled in on those

ropes & tossed between bright umbrages until shaken out,

those high society joints, my pockets don’t jingle now,

replenish me. Wasps might weave through busily, wiggle into

clouts & congestions, O open up, O aerate, O illume with

bright scuffle, do not block their intricate passages,

match like with like, like contraries what gives receives,

memory rebuilds in loose-limbed progeny cleaving air

in whatever time they take, their own time, bursting scent

from laden heads & nodding come-ons, in that patter

breach skin-memory through lips opposed, breach security

heard in trill or descant, met in dream when stock still.

2009