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We made love in the woods in the silence of the heat
of the day. Wild strawberries were everywhere, serrated
leaves hiding bright red, almost sweet fruit, ripened from hard green,
from pale creamy flowers; nothing matches the ruthlessness
of plants, the white jealous thorough roots, the thirst for light.
Birds and insects disappeared, the stillness like a glass
wall around us, the empty woods, the close smell of bruised plants.
You in your green dress. We filled cups with berries, carried them
back to cover them in sugar all night. The bells woke us
every morning; we ate the fruit slowly, smiling, touching
that strange hard knot on your belly— the implantation, root
of the embryo that stopped drifting— that was all between us.
Ploughing the same hillside year under year, you never know: you discover, uncover the field's hoard of stones, spearheads, plovers, crops dancing the seasons to harvest.
Every furrow's a journey, chancy as any fisherman's search for silver, pitting a deck's neat clutter against the break of the sea and its rhythms.
In this town far from the sea someone has crammed a skip with stones from a demolition; placed each relic with the care demanded by a drystone dyke, a harbour wall, a foundation.
We sit on the edge to eat. Below our feet sea birds slide through layers of space,
fulmar's hard glide swerves to fit in a cleft, sit safe on a sloping ledge.
Above the cliffs, a bulge of air stitched by swifts as they read the invisible
swell and slip of wind shoved up by the rim of sea and land,
where a kestrel finds a spot: hangs still as a hook: swoops
to kill. A stack of gulls is a tower in the air, a slow mill, turning
below a squat cloud, a leather purse crammed with silver,
coins about to spill into the sea that always breaks and stays unbroken.
The Month of the Holy Souls: Out of the depths the whole school sang in the big school hall, Purgatory pressing their unspoken reproaches down upon us all. We sang it at Josie Crawford's funeral too, stared at the whiteness of his coffin, imagined what he'd turned into, hidden in the dark. He splintered the factory skylight, fell to crack his skull on the steel rim of the acid vat, then splashed inside. The first brutal death of my life. He'd always scared me, now here was his picture, huge in The Record. He was dead. We survived to sing November hymns for the souls of the faithful departed, patient amidst the cleansing flames. He left me an image of thick white stuff that burns, destroys, then drifted away from the quick tough flicker of his days.
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