Raw in tooth
I wonder if the honest response to ‘Nature’ now
is simply shouting: ‘Fuck!’ – at least in English –
while laughing, crying, or both at once.
If encounters with the more than human stir
adrenal, heart-gut responses, what can possibly
be said to what remains? Apart from, sorry.
In less urgent times, a poet’s ‘O!’ or ‘Oh!’ or ‘Ah!’
may have been enough, before a need to craft, to be
sublime, betrayed them with overwrought expression.
As they went ravishing the earth, exhausting once abundant
deposits of metaphor and simile, mining out the finest word
seams, deforesting the pristine phrases, leaving only: ‘Fuck!’
On first looking into Reece
Winstone’s Bristol As It Was
I used to love a city that was never really
there, a place made of photographs not brick.
Quaysides thronged with sullen, bearded boys,
thumbs thrust deep behind their buttoned braces.
Seemed more alive than mine did in the 80s –
a grey blur of faces drifting between shops, strung
along heartless concrete streets, in what passed
then for a centre, final score forever Bristol City 0.
So I looked back instead to other worlds once
found in the same location. Where dark flat caps
contrasted with soaring, creamy ostrich feathers,
poking at the sky from the heads of women,
dressed like mobile pyramids of velvet.
No wonder they always seemed to stumble up
the steeper streets. Each lined with crooked
houses, a passing wolf might easily blow down.
And all the roads were filled with horses shitting,
pulling vehicles made from signs. Advertising
wonders from a future so recently arrived it still
played out, right there, in jerky black-and-white.
Try explaining green away
Imagine Green had leaked away, got lost,
no longer to be found in light, or paint, or anywhere
at all – the only traces left, lingering on in language.
How would you remember, how would you explain?
Perhaps you’d try to reconstruct a parakeet? Take apart
some mint, describe a piece of jade, then segue into sage,
before plunging into lichen, lime, olive, unripe banana,
emerald and apple.
Would you go enthusing over every hue?
From livid sphagnum moss, to the way the colour used
to fill up peas, layer inside sprouts, or ease itself into uncut
wheat, inspiring shades of gloss.
You might do that before going on to mention, that
in fairy tales, green could signal troll, or manifest in the water
beads, that glisten on a toad giant’s warty back, or be located
dancing, in the scales, which form a mermaid’s end.
Maybe you’d remember how green beguiled believers,
winking through stained glass, or go sparking off the circle
of an empty bottle fallen to the street, like tiny grounded stars.
You’d have to relate somehow, that only green made sense
of frog and forest, pistachio, seaweed, kelp. Then you might
laugh at how certain tints drove certain people mad
– for steam trains and classic cars.
You’d probably want to mention that in abstract form,
green could equal hope and also envy: because after all,
it was so very often on the money.
Yeah – on and on, you’d have to go, until one day, once
English was finally exhausted, you’d have to take a breath,
then start again in Welsh…
Flights, Issue Nine, June 2023
Flight of the dragonfly 