Issue 16: May 2010

Judy Brown| Jane Draycott | Wayne Holloway-Smith | Amy Key | John Stammers | Heather Philipson

 

JANE DRAYCOTT

How he knew he was turning to glass

By the curvature of the earth’s spin
visible through his shoes.
By the icicle noises made by messengers
arriving with news of battle.
By the feathers.

By the playing like wind in his hair of exhalations
from the distant leper colony.
By the images of himself repeated in the candelabras
of his erections.
By the dark water.

By the constellations left behind with particles
of pink and green on the bathmat.
By his flying at night over gardens of coral
blossoming like surgeons’ blades.
By the coldness of his feet.

By the writing in the air above the shoulders
of certain of his friends.
By the misty appearance at dusk of seven stars
best seen by looking away.
By the piles of sand.

Because tonight the beech

Because tonight the beech will consider its life,
its lack of a future, tree hair thinning
and tree heart turning to stone or splinters of ice

they will arrive now, the snow girls, swimming in
from their islands, weightless detonations of paper or marble
or light, casting no shadows and wearing no shoes.

Not asking what country, whose footsteps or features or fable,
they’ll travel together like raiders, sending the ghosts
of previous weather curling across the dunes

feathering stonework and fences, their deepening presence
an absence, a plainness of speech laid on car parks or lawns,
a glimpse of a possible future, making a difference

to everything, this arrival of strangers, now –
familiar, unblemished, and just the right age for snow.

From The Night Tree (Oxford Poets)