Seeing in the Dark

An Angel stood at the edge of the cave, Its walls curving out towards the night. Bulging with contained and over-fed darkness. Purple hues ballooned and blossomed in the depths before his eyes. White luminescent wings twitched, longing for rooms that sang with space and streamed with sunlight. Open windows to step out of into brilliant, beckoning skies.
But the cave and the darkness was calling the Angel and he was not at liberty to refuse. The claustrophobia slid clammy hands over his face once inside the cavern, though his feet echoed on the puddled floor; describing vast emptiness about him. But it was the darkness not the walls of the cave that caused the Angel to feel suffocated.
The Angel felt the blackness inside his lungs, insipid and poisonous to his breathing light. The clouds ahead embraced and wrestled with each other. The Angel flexed his wings, sending muscular ripples beneath their feathery coats that were no longer swan-white but raven. He strode deep into the heart of the cavern, ready to see the dark.

Prayer

Day-by-day,
Let the same songs go astray.
Let unconscious birds sing,
And let their voices ring
With all the pain I'm yet to feel,
With all the wounds I'm yet to heal.

Day-by-day, allow their feathers
To fall and cut my wiry tethers.
Softest touch to sharpest cut,
The marks of bonds release with hurt.
Snap back and rest with blood-slicked sigh,
And leave me alone with birds and sky.

Let them cocoon my bones mid-flight,
And scatter them into the night.
Let each chunk of marrowy matter
Hit the stars and shatter.
Make a constellation of light-drawn birds,
that day-by-day will not be heard.

Paper Feet

She used to tell me I'd catch my death, leaving my hair wet.
She'd make fish cakes in cases of orange breadcrumbs.
Walk me home from PVA smelling art classes. Then one day she had to
Stop and
Rest before home.

She would play cribbage and beat us all, winning hundreds of Scottish pounds.

She'd take us brass rubbing in the alleys of Edinburgh.
And I'd embellish
Originals with unicorns.

Thick and hard shortbread,
No match for false teeth.

Crawl into her bed in the first light and feel her
Dry paper feet next to mine.
There, she'd tell me stories in her hairnet.

She was given a huge brass bell from the orphanage
Where she was Cook.
She gave so much and made no fuss,
'Ah, din ni bother!'

Now my hair hangs wet
All the time.

The brass rubbing shop has closed
For good.
And I've no one to lose at crib to.

Paper skin ashed away on Salisbury Craggs.

But I have her in my face and hands
Spitting Image - so they said
Again and
Again
At the funeral.
Stiff Scottish lips and not much room for tears.

But that was just a day,
An Event.

Grief does not answer to calendars.
It can wait in tucked away memories, until
Ready to to be undone. Aired and worn.

A history I don't really know but may yet find in myself.
Death is not always loud and determined.
It can be
Slow and
Messy, like spreading paint on a clean floor.
Trodden in and about.

A withering end,
Dispersed to a stop.
Means not the end.

Bell on shelf, ready to
Ring out her strength,
The echoes resounding in me.

Cliff Begin

I can lie here and wait for the rain to begin.
I can lie here and hold my breath till
The first drop plummets down beside me.
Behold the sky that’s tipping
Over the edge of a cliff and into a storm.

Electricity in the sky.
That’s where I’ll begin.

Make life across the thunderous suffocation.
Or wait.
For a drop that fails to fail.
Or wait.
For the rest of the drops after one.

A lot can happen on a cliff edge.
A lot can begin.

I’ll scoop my hands ready for the fall.

Waiting to feed empty space with rain water.
Waiting to tip it up over my head.

Trickle down between my eyes.
Taste it.
And let it feed me the voltage.

Electricity in the water.
In my bones.

That’s where I‘ll begin.

Gold and Milk

In the land of angels, the ground is made of marble. The sky is full of shifting clouds of white and gold, metallic paint spilled and swirled in a glass of milk. The clouds sing like wind sighing over bottle necks. Great and hushing accompaniment to the celestial. Sometimes rain falls from the dancing sky.

Drops trace their way to the ground. Filling curves in the stonework. Sculpture of the afterlife. Or the waiting life. Suspension?

Skyfall fills the basins. Places to cleanse. Sluice away the earth and the pain and the mortal.

Wings of swans can break a man’s leg. Wings of Angels can do so much more, terrible.

Lie supported and lie surrounded by the rain. Shallows are safe. No depths of unknown below, all that soars above. Out of reach. For now.

Mark your way across the eternal quarry. Or stay and listen to the heaving and leaping sound than awakens across sky.

Not a land of angels. This is no land. This is a world around the world. It is always a step or a sleep away. Or a moment of despair.

Reach me if you will. Take your hurt and wash it away in a basin of marble with the golden tears of above.

Reach me and listen to the sky sing the pain from your screaming bones.

Reach. Take. Make me feel again.

Selkie

I used to live in a grey stone terrace. It was not remarkable. The girl next door was.

The neighbours had been completely mundane up until that point. They came and went and vanished into their houses, houses exactly the same as mine but maybe oppositely arranged. Then he, Number Twenty-Three, brought the girl back from the sea.

He had been visiting an aunt or a friend or on business, it doesn’t matter which. I heard the diesel chugging of a taxi pull up, like a milk cart pulling over cobbles. We didn’t get many taxi cabs in the street so I gave way to my curiosity and twitched the curtains. And there she was. All silver and reflection. Her hair shimmered in the dishwater morning light as though it were the inside of oyster shells, spun into gossamer. She slipped up the path and disappeared out of view.

The girl would go out every day and everyday I would watch her across the road and down the pavement. She wouldn’t falter or quaver in her route. Not straight, but her line was direct nonetheless. She would return in a matter of hours with no shopping and no evidence of where her feet had taken her. I shifted my desk so I could see more clearly. She moved like mercury spilt on a marble floor. I can’t remember what she wore only what she was. She was the sea, or part of it at least. Number Twenty-Three had not brought back a woman, he had returned with the ocean. Like when children gather too many pebbles and stones on seaside visits. His bucket was brimming over with too much of the sea to comfortably keep

She was brimming over with salty water and weighed heavily on the dry land. I could feel it every time she passed. The pull of her on this inland town and this bone dry terrace.

Then, one day, it rained and I saw her pause opposite my window. She wavered on the spot like a tendril of seaweed in current and moved on. But she had paused. In the rain she had looked at a puddle. The one that always forms there, between the sagging paving slabs. She had given it a look so direct it was almost a command. When she returned the sun had been shining long enough to dry out the street and she returned just as she did any of the other days.

The weather was infuriatingly dull for the next week. I would listen to the forecast as soon as I was up and curse at the clear blue skies for their monotony. When clouds eventually rolled in they were meagre in their offerings. A breath of shower. But she noticed and she stopped once more that morning. The next day was more fruitful. A downpour whilst she was in town, or wherever it was she went. I waited, fox like, at the window for her return and when she did I reaped my reward. A full ten minutes of intensely bearing down upon a silly puddle, like it held the answers to an ocean.

A door slammed and she moved on in a wave of silver hair.

Things seemed to be changing in the street as I monitored the activities of the girl from the sea. The air grew thick and the bricks began to bear resentment. The neighbours scowled more than was usual and the stray cats found other haunts. She was weighing on the bucket, like it was full of seaside stones.

The storm came on her sixteenth day in the terrace. Beating fists of water hammered the roof and the pavement. She left the house as always. No, not as always, for this time she was leaving. She crossed the street and stood before the growing pool in the sagging slabs. Then, she looked up and gazed directly at me, through the rain and the glass to me. I knew her then. I knew the ocean; the currents, the shores, the sound of the deepest Neptune mountains and the desires of the surf.

Then she left.

She stepped forward into that silly puddle, in the pouring rain. They say all water leads to the sea. She left to the sea. She left me for the sea.

Sometimes I cross the street on rainy days and gaze into that puddle. I think I can hear the sea over the pattering drops. But perhaps that’s all it is, thinking. Number Twenty Three moved out a few weeks after she left. Number Twenty-One said he went to live by the sea. I hope he did.

Villanelle

Please don’t wait for me; I’ll stay caught in light.

I like to watch the fireflies play at life,

They dance like earth was spinning all too tight.

Go on ahead, I’ll catch you up. I might

Take time to ponder forests’ silent strife.

Please don’t wait for me; I’ll stay caught in light.

The ground is wet. My dress is too. The sight

Of insects at my feet – literal lowlife,

They dance like earth was spinning all too tight.

I sink my toes to muddy graves, slight

Shifting of soil. My weight connects cold life.

Please don’t wait for me; I’ll stay caught in light.

Damp rises through from beneath. Rotting blight.

I swell with times decay. Multiply life.

They dance like earth was spinning all too tight.

Alone I’ll stay, till rotted away. I might

Take years to disappear – feed millions with life.

Please don’t wait for me; I’ll stay caught in light.

They dance like earth was spinning all too tight.

Tail Feathers

The man reached down and touched the Raven’s feathers with a weathered hand. The wind shifted in the night and her plumage rose and fell with it. She turned her pit-black eyes to his, but he could not hold the gaze of one he had sentenced to death. The touch was agony enough.

There were lights on the horizon, which took the night in the forest further towards darkness than it knew. They danced on the air currents like ink dropped into water, smudging the sky and dispersing into rivers of hue. Mauve, indigo and the green of winter pines all fed into the black canvas above the trees. The light show reflected in the raven’s eyes, making the shadows deeper and the colours rise in pitch. He fixed his gaze on the sky and prayed for her to break her beady stare.

He wanted to tell her the world would end tonight. That he wouldn’t live on without her and there would be nothing left to know after sunrise. But that would be a lie and another lie would turn his lips to dust.

Perhaps he could set her free, unlock the cuffs about her claws and watch her fade into the blackness? But she would return with armies. She had a duty to her people and her blood; the actions of a fool in love could never answer for a century more of carnage.

He felt the bird turn outwards beneath his fingers, it was time. She had given permission, she had given up. A tiny creature holding so much terrible strength beneath those feathers.

The man lifted the raven and took her to the wooden block waiting on the battlements. Her heart was beating so slowly and unwaveringly. He placed the bird gently with her chest to the jet sky and held a hand across her, leaving a gap between his fingers above her drum-beat heart.

This was the end of a legend in his hands. The lights were still in her eyes and he wished she would close them. The reflected illuminations were moving faster than those they were mirroring and faster than her pulse in his palm. There was fear and hope and sadness and love all dancing together in the glassy shadows looking up at him.

He took a silver dagger from his boot and held it over the space he had made with the other hand on her chest. The raven’s eyes blinked and he knew that he could. The blade seemed to move of its own will down through the soft plumage, flesh and cracking bone. When he pulled it smoothly free from the body, for that was all it now was, the blade was coated in blood the shade that berries stain children’s faces. The raven’s eyes had closed at last and the skin of the drum-heart had split.

The man dropped the dagger and plucked a tail feather from the corpse. He turned and held it up to the sky. Suddenly, the ether shook and swelled with the intense power coursing through it. The lights on the horizon twisted and churned and plaited into one long streaming rope, rushing through the night air towards him. They fed into the plume as though a crystal funnel were pouring lighting-diamonds into its core. Then all was shadow once more, except the feather, which glittered with all the shades of darkness against the sky.

Willow

They left me by the shore of a beautiful emerald lake. The water glistened the morning light that was siphoned through the valley sides. I could tell that they were planning something as we sailed down stream. Their eyes kept shifting, like bodies in restless sleep.

I was bundled onto the mud bank and tied to a tree. A willow. They didn’t look back, fear of their deeds kept their faces forward. The boat set sail to the rising sun and was soon swallowed into the horizon.

I sat by the water and watched the world grow dark and light again and again. My hair grew long and turned to leafy willow-tails. My toenails curled and twisted into the damp earth. They became the roots that fed me. I began to understand the slow language of the trees and the willow that was my prison guard. We became lovers and the bonds broke. My skin turned to bark and my eyes closed to the world I had so longed to be released to.

When they returned to bury my bones, thinking that would absolve their guilt, they found only two willows where they had left me. They couldn’t remember if there had been two there before. But we knew. My lover and I wanted them get into the boat once more. This time I was glad to see them go. Left with my willow. We spent an eternity by the lake and watched a million sunrises glisten on the emerald water.

Trees