Poetry: Bike/Sick Bed/Frying Pan
Published in Dreich Extra WINTER, December 2020
Bike
‘Darling, don’t be a bike’
Mum said to me on the phone
a long time ago
I was going on a date
with a good man
but that’s by the by.
Six syllables spilling over me as I walk upriver
against rain, trace a white-throated dipper
drowning itself in torrents of wind
wet rock raises lichen into fierce relief
Mum’s colours: peacock, russet, gold, oxidised blood. She’s been dead
a decade, the river is coming on strong, I hunker down
by the pool they call The Pot where sea trout leapt last summer
sheer silhouettes of muscle and drive
today my eyes are lost in white miasma
veils of rock-spun water hiding the secrets between
that could sink you to sick
turn you pure snow-melt green
to be water-flung
spittle and spit and spawn
to be fallen.
What mattered was the sting in the ‘darling’.
SICK BED
Screeds of hail pulse past your window
cross the Cowpark among hoodies all-a-spin
the lazy-flapping sea eagle comes in
for pig guts left out on the knoll
and you in bed - slowly, poorly, you
too ill you say to be up and about
but well enough to watch the storm
to lay warm fingers on yourself
find a skudding that takes you deep
somewhere unaccountable and dark
beyond hail and mind and pig-death.
Frying Pan
Amongst chanterelle
birch leaves glitter
you burn fingers picking them out
I want to plate them in gold
for the sake of forever.
You break a hard-shelled egg
one feather fascinated to its side
breakfast too beautiful to bear.