English Literature

Pens pause one last time,
above the gaping permafrost
of the page

while outside
swifts are scribbling furiously
upon the thinning haze

and summer is swaying us
with the slow, emphatic argument
of the trees.

“One chance, you get at this,”
he is telling us from the front.
One chance.

January

Back on our black hill. Day’s first spark
still an hour below the Beacon. Past the usual
joggers and dog-walkers, fluent in the unlearned argot
of raised eyebrows, nods and grunts. A tinnitus of distant
guessed-at lives. Quarries, slab-sided industrial estates,
the motorway already almost in full spate. And so

close to the stars. The chill of their long-dead light
unseaming your aching spine, already bowed
by their terrible weight. Look both ways into the dark;
to watch for them falling away from you, so slowly
as to seem unchanging, or walk down into
familiar constellations, remade with your every step.

Dio Boia

A curse, literally “executioner god”, in some northern Italian dialects

Not that he is one
for anything too public or exemplary;
tumbrils, gallows, gibbets
or a cloud of doctors
around a chair festooned with wires.

Much more the type
to abandon you to the badlands.
Howling emptiness, fierce skies.

Often, you’ll forget the sentence
entirely, until you arrive home one day
and unlock the sun-blistered front door
to find the history piled up behind it

and him, patient in the easy chair
toting the tools of his trade.