Four poems considering eels, tides, deer, dragonflies, species science, and time

Hawkins, David

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

The Goose Volume 18 Number 2 Miscellany (An Extra-Open Issue) / méli-mélo (numéro très ouvert) Article 35 11-10-2020 Four Poems David Hawkins University of Oxford alumnus)  Part of the Creative Writing Commons Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres: https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée Hawkins, David. "Four Poems." The Goose, vol. 18 , no. 2 , article 35, 2020, https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss2/35. This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca. Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez scholarscommons@wlu.ca. Eel Met by Moonlight   Whose silver belly recycles mudflats’   blaze light whose silt-brown   muddy back seen flee-  tingly dissolves clitoral under wet pebbles  between roots  of wild celery  among dreams of still-sea  slender mucus remaindered  on wet hands grafting badly  into the dimming  delve-water.  Why catch an eel? To bait imagination,  untie some knots maybe release  luminescing fish  into new mystery.  Eels in reverse make no sense,  our Sargassos  1Hawkins: 4 PoemsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020rise evenly  at the centre of measureless tides.  Measureless tides rise unevenly.  Every unmeasured thing betides.                                   2The Goose, Vol. 18, No. 2 [2020], Art. 35https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss2/35Sketchbook from the Front   Out on the dusk road, sky as a dark blue shield; whenever you pass a diorama of deer in the floodplain meadows, as if placed there as an image of peace, never turning their heads in the direction of traffic but remaining intent on their quiet task of grazing, their soft necks curved in a gentle arc, their soundless footsteps dainty among the long stems of tall fescue and false oat-grass that shimmer holographically in the wind as they drop swollen ticks like a long slow wound, an ellipsis of blood, you’re reminded again of Franz Marc. Not the iconic oils of brightly coloured animals posing archetypally in the middle-period works, but the “sketchbook from the front” of his last days—just pencil lines wavering along the vertiginous edge of the abyss, where the future seemed to coalesce as a knot of vanishing points refusing to vanish but rather staying brutally intact, as if the artist was hurtling into that wide disappearance, taking their place, and leaving us with this crush of horizons like a maze, a riddle or a puzzle adventure. But the pre-arranged deer remain steady, refusing the next move. And you wonder if this long long drive is just some misled and unfunded attempt “merely to by-pass / the obstruction caused by a burst / god.”1 And you wander until the curving earth swallows your split trail.                   1 Roy Fisher, A Furnace (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1986), 46. 3Hawkins: 4 PoemsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020New Dragonfly Species Notes2   Novel yellow-black-seared yellow  settles twig-like on a twig imploded cathedrals taut   over its back,  thrusters down, relaxed.   Prey fritter in pieces across those complex  litmus-blue monitors (it’s too easy to think of a machine)  pause speed is not motion but coalescing into new space through a bright arc of vision like emerging from your own burnt-out pupil, the sun: several moves ahead.  Hope is teneral female gathering that darkening yellow into robust black frames, how an abdomen curves when gravid, to emplace  2 This “new” dragonfly is the Cazuma Pincertail, but the poem could equally well apply to any dragonfly new to science.  4The Goose, Vol. 18, No. 2 [2020], Art. 35https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss2/35t’emplace, too place . . . on the devilled streambed those delicate unique processes.  Travelling at speed  across the shed snakeskin of this back country, there’s no way we could catch your bad moon blur. But if a hammerhead drone throws its distraction crystal up into the air anywhere near here please tear it apart  with some ancient wisdom shredded from fossil pages   pause as a dry brush passes over a flicker of dust.  It will be named after the river, if we can find the river and somehow look out its old name by inferring from the silt archive in its dwindling  its death-rattle under a capstone the size of forgets.  All these features have ruptured our spreadsheet.   5Hawkins: 4 PoemsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020Tideracing   stepping over ) our selves ( limboing  under themselves wave runnels saved until the next great upheaval wet spiracles open like closed  anemones post-constellating the shivered beach as a sanderling struts  in fast forward italics stalls flickers  focused nearingly on glittered shards of sunlight doing paradoxical times tables in some exclave of a wintering mind all the length of here to fleetingly there tracing the last tendril of a fractal unpossessed  6The Goose, Vol. 18, No. 2 [2020], Art. 35https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss2/35looking for the muted thing: a temp- orary aura of dry-gushing sand around each step retracting to level ground as we leave it perhaps/maybe  not really either footprints hover switchback undecidables to our long division perhaps  of this deterritorialized inbetweentimes gathering itself skimming below those liberated sky that vaunts  and gallops brightly away ice cube sun in enormous  unprintable sheets of blue      7Hawkins: 4 PoemsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2020DAVID HAWKINS is a writer, book editor and naturalist from Bristol, England. Particular areas of interest are edgeland habitats, ruderals, bryophytes and invertebrates. Recent work has appeared in Arc Poetry, Blackbox Manifold, Datableed, Interpreter’s House, Magma, Otoliths and White Review, among others. He was awarded second prize in the 2015 UK National Poetry Competition.  8The Goose, Vol. 18, No. 2 [2020], Art. 35https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol18/iss2/35

Four Poems

https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1646&amp;context=thegoose

Four Poems

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Wilfrid Laurier University