Giles Goodland

Beasts of Spring

Beasts of spring: shield your eyes!
The hinges where path meets road
have opened. The ants awaken
and are patrolling the stones, and birds
climb the stairs of their songs.

A leaf comes under a definition as
on the fingers of twigs leaves are sticking.
The trees have enlisted, the grass
is trembling its panicles and the flowers
are opening like bodies in surgery.

Fields shake off suits of water, nervous
bushes expose their shabby sex organs.
Within earshot of the controlled explosion
of gorse a language musters together some
people in order that it might be talked.

There is something it must say
so central there is no word
strong enough to reach and hold that
statement. Sentences clink.
They will be strong as cloud, and strike.

A long walk to unknown waterfalls
begins, and the stream under the hill
surfaces like a long-hidden joy.
We step from the wood onto the playing-field
and a seagull whees in consequence.

It hanglides against the traffic
wanting to say something, but it knows
any word would come out as scream.
Willows arrange themselves around a pond
in gestures of protection but the clouds

don’t stop falling in. A blackbird
makes a short prepared statement and leaves.
The weir is bursting, it has too much
to say so it says it again:
everything I say is blur, it says.

Body

If you place your ear upon a meatus
fluids will whisper against you
in dead tongues. If you could fold
these real clouds back into mental space
the blood would throw out its corpuscles.
Oddments of flow: cyclists tracing
against time lose their weight in memory.
The rain in each part of you is falling.
Cells chase memories and delete them.
You rub your eyes over new bones.
Forests rot with music under
a longlost unglossed midnight.
You look at the looking animals.
He with his vestigial ear where hair gets
in the way, the brawl of thumb,
his atoms celebrate mass by
climbing a set of steps. This and the sea’s
seethe, through trees. A cancer
negotiates time and property fragments
behind a face. Sometimes your shit
is lighter than water. The ghost
in the dictionary puddles the stars.
Drops in a cave amass each tooth
of stalactite as inside your mountain
the hollow laugh harms silence.
This is the mud through which you pass
as a labourer connects soil to mind
and the wind whistles and misses.
It is fragile as a pile of stones
sheltering in a shed of skin as liquid swarms
through the self you teeter
on this branched music from a window.

God Hides

God hides in the pylon as a small bird.
How we must fascinate and repel him.
He had in mind something on a minor scale,
a little above the hominids;
a few clay villages with maybe
one temple that approached a stature
he was comfortable with. Instead
he created his decline, his power
dwarfed by an easily available drug
or the attrition of media. Even he
is addicted to certain soaps and he has
a crack habit now: he keeps cracking
the sky to see what we are up to.
He watches for some combination
that unlocks the feel of a scene from a
disaster movie, before some ducks
stack into the air and dissolve in heat-haze.
In no sense, he thinks, do I understand
how things have grown from a bush
burning with inner agony and
one bearded Semite taking a story
and running with it into a changed world,
shouting something no one can hear.
It is important in this religion that
we seldom hear what these people are telling us
but the fact that someone should be
shouting and waving their fists is significant
and sometimes it feels like it could be me
walking into a field trying to knock down
the sky to fit into this nervous hole made of
laughter and books I do not remember
having read, but I must have done,
they have my annotations all over them.

Kitchen

A few sentences before this
blood turned itself into a person
the kitchen in flames
throating night into its
shanties of treasure, in a sexual sense.

I set sail for future incomes
when the fridge was hot as an oven
the sea rolling in the mouth
to sense the same body inside this one.

We had made love and afterwards
picked our clothes, kettle
calling from the other room
as the bread tightened behind us.

A helicopter throbbed under the
stars, skylights blinked off.

I worried at the centres of language
and produced little, but
often I have failed to find
the route on the map or

waited for energy to dispel
like a speech decantered into
a history book, its unprintable last page.

A Roomful of Cloud

The room can be turned off.
Milk turns in the fridge a new smell,
flame-lipped flowers lend heat.
On the wall the shadow of a former shelf
as my son’s fingers bud from his t-shirt.
We felt the beating of the clocks and
that midnight scratching in the wainscot

is the sound inside the sound of a house.
The dust whispers it had once been
the body of language, and we repeat the
silence forming. One of us
goes to the stereo and starts up
the almost unworkable engine
of a Beethoven quartet.

The wind had worked on the same tunes
for so long it whistles them in the dark.
The thin end of the moon wedges cold.

In one room the clock interleaves seconds
with silence, in another the colour is
measured in television hours. Mornings unmoor
from here, sometimes the door opens
onto a lane to the land of the dead.

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