Issue 4: November 2003

David L Briggs | Carrie Etter | Roddy Lumsden | Liane Strauss | Frances Williams

DAVID L BRIGGS

Historia Occultica

Scrying evolved in the early
Cuckoo period: an old crone,
exiled to the thick of the wood,

saw through her crude glass darkly,
for a fee. One might pay with duck
eggs, robed in night to avoid arcane

imputations of devilry. And
we are led to wonder just
what, exactly, she could see:

damsel-tupping goatswains?
measure-cheating merchants?
the clause in a ripening will?

All grist to her mill, no doubt,
as she sat picking through the offal
of lone wealth, and longevity.

The English Technician

The English Technician will wear carmine
jackets, and one shoe marked High, and one shoe
marked Low. The English Technician will
abandon the photocopying
to Arctic winds lurching through the schoolyard
like overdeveloped schoolboys because
he has sensed something divine in that bell-
bordered wasteland. The English Technician
will brew the perfect pot of peppermint tea,
and recite Soyinka while spooning the sugar.

The English Technician will remark that
the mackerel quality of the evening
sky is like a delicate filigree
of Traansvaal silver he received from a blind,
Egyptian carpet merchant in exchange
for a contretemps concerning Chatterton.

The English Technician will ride a green
butcher's bicycle through the school gates
at precisely one minute before the bell
every morning. The English Technician
will often be unnecessary, but
always elegant. The English Technician
will sometimes be found rubbing earth into
his cheeks because he has forgotten
the battles of Sherra-moor, and Agincourt.

The English Technician will sometimes be found
rubbing earth into other people's cheeks
because it is cold. In winter people
will cry, "Where is the English Technician?"
because they believe the sky to be falling.

It will be difficult to know clearly
what the English Technician is thinking,
as he brings you books opened to pages
you had not formerly known to exist.

River, with Pylons

The road home cuts through a floodplain
pocked with pylons, like those we climbed
when children fleeing the suburb
in expedition to the river.

Older boys warned of blood-crazed
leeches snicking through warm shallows;
of the kid who peeled off wet trunks
and found one bristling on his bell-end;

of pike teeth snatching wet skin
like barbed-wire. We waded in
timidly until a silt-ooze
between toes made us hazard our

wish-boned bodies against currents.
A dense silage-musk bent willow
boughs low over cold water,
like soft parabolas we dived

under skies too pure to conceive
drowning, too lucid to believe
the cautionary tales beloved
by adults. Distant tractor engines.

Lowing of milk-glutted cattle.
Marsh bird cackle and sudden wing-flap
from green rushes. Barely one mile
from the industrial estate,

the motorway, the power plant.
Only an odd buzz from power
cables threatened into that far
pastoral. Now, the river widens

as I drive into the city,
and the pylons retreat behind
a furrowed brow in the rear-view mirror:
the fresh-ploughed thoughts of that child.

David L Briggs received an Eric Gregory award in 2002. He reads and organises readings in Bristol where he lives, and in Bath where he teaches English.