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The morning light creaks               Glass

         Walking In           (from) Who Killed Prees Heath?

 

The morning light creaks

 

They send the girl each morning to gather firewood.

She stands in the place where the trees stood,

shaking – the gasp of pits, the quiet: stunned

 

fits of burning on sharp sand – and such

wounded heat lifting from the white surface.

She could bake bread, boil water, without fire.

 

Her face, her belly, stings – the air flails –

heat winds invisible candles, white shadows.

Twisted sisal bites into her fingers –

 

if she could only fasten its long coils

round the air, bundle by bundle.  She holds

the rope, loops it in emptiness, knots it.

 

The threads shiver, part, run like water, chased

lightning in the prickled palms of her hands.

 

 

Eleanor Cooke

in collection, Secret Files, 1994, Cape Poetry,
ISBN 1357910 8642

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Glass

 

The thread drops, still burning, where he lies

fused to the sand, pale glass, a crystal shadow

blown to shattering in the dunes.

 

The flame dances, runs, and the skin of glass

cracks – water that had forgotten it was

knit up like seas.  He cries out

 

as the fissure opens up along the lines of his shoulder.

The edge of his half-turned face lifts from the sand,

and the girl sees him – a man of ice.

 

She looks at him as if at a dream of angels.

Bones of his wings fall from him: leavings of flight

drop like silver coins onto a plate.

 

He comes to her more than naked, a moving glass.

She looks through the refracted distance he sheds,

the cut-out sand, and he coming at her

 

like a lit shade, like a correction of her vision.

The space behind him magnifies.  His entry

is sharp, cold, and her unbroken blood

 

stains like roses held against the light.

And it is he who cries out, breaks; his prick

lodged, a crystal finger, inside her.

 

 

Eleanor Cooke

in collection, Secret Files, 1994, Cape Poetry,

ISBN 1357910 8642

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Walking In

 

The white house;

is where it always was in the dream

the road behind twisting into its own double bend.

But I am coming from the other side,

walking towards my self,

still out of sight.

 

I stare at the reflection of the dream

uncurling itself from sleep,

sitting up in its coffin,

easing into motion.

A stone on the wall

freezes into a wrinkled apprehension;

the road cracks into widening black veins.

 

I back off, turn,

afraid to glance over my shoulder

to where, behind,

someone who looks like me is striding out,

passing the white house,

closing the gap.

 

 

Eleanor Cooke

in collection, A Kind of Memory, Seren, ISBN 0-907476-87-2

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(from) Who Killed Prees Heath?

 

Is it the rain or tears

clawing at the low horizon,

shaking the green to grey monochrome?

Tyre-splash haze from exhausted lorries

cries out.  Is it an elegy,

Green Man, Heath Man?

Or a visitation, haunting –

a touch, tug on the sleeve, to tell,

spell us out,

crackling with the horror of it,

how it was, how it is,

grey-green mist, for you.

 

Left, have they, the nymphs,

the young men departed, run off,

cries winding in to laughter or terror.

Each one tears from his head, hers,

the wild rose.  Thorns catch –

do they? – their hair,

drag it into painted currents,

the dogs barking,

the men blowing into a buisine,

horses rearing from green and gold

pages.......................

 

 

Eleanor Cooke

in Who Killed Prees Heath?, 1991,

Bristol Classical Press/SWT, ISBN 0-950863-72-6

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