Stag Beetle

More than an hour ago
you gave up the task,
blaming bad-egg odours
sniffed in these joints.
In such heat, already
the tight-packed innards
beginning to shrivel.
Now disentangling again
these extraordinary legs
with the nib of a pen
you unpack sheathed uppers
and balletic elbows,
these rough serrations
beyond spindly wrists,
my six feet like clamps
like a chameleon’s…
What you think could be
ball-and-socket joints
abut the shell that gleams
less ebony in this light
that leaves you floundering.
What you want to know
is how it feels locked
in insensitive plate
with the world of signals
intrusive only from
a few live ends. You try
to imagine how it must be
to live within edges
toothed and raw, a pack
of saws ripped from some
black hole in creation.
You tease antlers apart
try to peer at what lies
beneath my pitch-black
forehead, but only find
a nest of feelers,
each furred and rooted
too deeply to betray
even a glimmer of purpose.
In the palm of your hand
I lie, seeming alien,
but you have forgotten
mysteries you pursue
at night without a word
to where she sleeps
beside you – or to others
who raised you, walking
far more stiff-legged
and beetle-like now –
or children rising tall
on the terrace outside,
excited at what you see
as an unremarkable
view of the hills that
for them is trembling
on the brink of singing,
an excitable world
to which you bring only
puzzlement or derision.
O yes I am the stag
of your age and occlusion.
You must fight me now.
I am not yet dead.
 

Martyn Crucefix

published in collection, Hurt, 2010, Enitharmon Press,
ISBN 1-904634-97-3

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An English Nazareth

     In 1061, Lady Richeldis of Walsingham, in a series of visions,
     received instructions to build a replica of Christ’s home.
 
We – who have only our strength to sell
and so little here to be thankful for –
we know well she has never risen
from that embroidered footstool
where she embroiders her mornings.
Yet she has stood in His simple home,
she says, the woodshavings obvious
on the clay floor, the cramp, the cool.
And because she has power over us
to manufacture walls out of English
ground, to her specifications
(though she insists, not hers at all;
she’s only a witness to the original),
because of this her dream has weight.
Here, a slant of evening sun, the saw
still warm in the red-grained wood.
Here, the hammer’s shout on the nail
each time bursting and then dying off
as she passes a door out of Palestine.
In an ecstasy, at least three times –
though not moving one tailor’s inch
off that embroidered footstool
where we imagine her long fingers
fumbling over the detail in her lap –
we picture her there, tall and swaying
richly through Christ’s small house.
And no matter how vivid her dream,
local men build as we have always built:
English wood upon English earth.
The best we deliver is a mockery,
a cacked version of our own poor homes
(those shambles she’s never visited)
yet this is the one she will have us deck
with flowers, have us light, keep warm,
proof from rain, since this is the roof
under which she expects to dwell
long in grace, in that other real place.
While we – who have only ourselves to sell –
give praise to God for the gift of work.
 

Martyn Crucefix

published in collection, An English Nazareth, 2004, Enitharmon Press,
ISBN 1-900564-14-9

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On night’s estate

The longer that I stare, the blacked-out
expanses grow more hard to look into –
unlike the United States, unsheathing
its gleaming Floridan sword,
its rash of yellow citidots.
The earth is on fire
south of the Great Lakes’ blue pools,
grows more black, but not empty,
out through standing
mid-west corn, block on starry block,
swept to the Pacific’s violet edge.
 
There, shy Australia lies on display.
A single lemon necklace,
loose from Brisbane to Adelaide.
The monumental Asiatic blacks,
their spilt drops of gold
spattering Europe, where it grows
lighter from east to west.
The cobra-squirm of the Nile
is a slithering focus to a blazing delta.
 
We are those who show ourselves
most clearly when we sleep.
We become like children,
sprawled, unconscious and equal
to the next lamplight.
The world in numerable parts.
Our dreams, a ferocious inequality,
as no-one lives in the Icelandic
inky black, the soot-back of Canada,
the Arctic, ebony of Antarctica,
the emptied Amazon basin,
the Russian steppes, Himalayan pitch.
 
Whatever life goes on there,
it keeps such a quiet light.
A few red sores of flaming oil-fields.
The indigo of burning forest
in the bulb of Brazil.
And across central Africa,
fat Africa is the body of dark
I hear cry out the kind of catastrophe
it will take to revive the night’s wrap.
Let darkness fall as it now appears:
beneath the close of twelve billion lids,
the monster is asleep and dreams of stars.
 

Martyn Crucefix

published in collection, An English Nazareth, 2004, Enitharmon Press,
ISBN 1-900564-14-9

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A boy’s errand

I go to Spar and Mr Adams
who drops his small hands
beneath the counter
where it’s already wrapped
in white tissue paper.
Crisp, soft and undisturbed,
I carry it close to my chest,
the length of my forearm,
palm flat to one end.
It’s like something asleep.
It seems crisper today –
the pressure of my fingers
telling the birth-smell
of heat, yeast, risen air.
The confining tin
held sides to softness
and the crusty burst,
split down the length,
sharp-edged and breakable,
caramelly across my tongue.
And each bite a glimpse –
one leading to the next
till I’m nuzzling in,
jaggedness on my cheeks
being bitten, biting deep
through crust to white flesh
as if there were a heart
unconsumed somewhere
I might lay my hands on
bring back to the house.
 

Martyn Crucefix

published in collection, An English Nazareth, 2004, Enitharmon Press,
ISBN 1-900564-14-9

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