Party Animals

Sue Rose-Wray

David Attenborough is coming to dinner.
His jacket jingles with jungles,
an ocean deep in each pocket,
a smile full of diffident wolves.
Time-lapsed
brush-combed clouds
scud-scudder
around his head.

He brings a frozen desert dessert,
Incan chilli-chocolates
and a bunch of wild flowers
                                         trailing
                                                hummingbirds;
neptuning their wings.

His boots,
the seven league pair,
stand by the front door.
No treading steppes into my carpet.
For he’s as poised as a porpoise
schooled in conduct
sociably sonar scanning.
Entirely natural
and seldom solitary.

Sipping spring water he’ll say,
“there’s nothing common
about the common dolphin.
Leaping for joy
clicking cowboy
of the sea, corralling
up spates of sardines
glittering like tins.
Bait balls
in splintering whorls.”
Unanimous small fry swarm,
unsafe in the shallows,
as doll-eyed, dull-eyed, dead-eyed
silent sharks,
radiator gilled,
cruise the sidewalks,
stalk seafood,
belch a bit
and pick their teeth
with Pilot fish.

Over our Moules Marinieres,    
once mussels; wrenched,
clenched, desperate as limpets,
prised
from mossy glossy rocks,
I’m baleened, beluga’d,
blown off course
by the whale in his wineglass
erupting wild whalesong
by plankton lantern light.

David looks up.
His gaze scrambles
a feathered battalion;
Egyptian eye-linered gannets.
Max Factored apricot and cream,
painted and mated for life;
Pharaohs freed from papyrus tombs.
“Watch them wheeling.”
By candlelight
they spread-eagle,
deltoid to diver.
Hiss their fire-arrows
into the sea.
Lean mean fishing machines,
vapour trailed
by cloudbursts
of champagne bubbles.
Oh, David!

Down where the sun has no warmth,
peaked perma-frosted
water-ice caverns—
More sorbet, David?

We turn hard to port,
walnuts crack like bone.
Fair-tradewinds coffee mistrals
his sundowned brow.

His eyes now drowsy
as dormant volcanoes.
Stay David,
melt the frozen wastes
of my white bed,
my aeon-rippled ice-floe sheets.
Sleep David,
go deep.
Skipper your green glacier galleon.
Odyssey east, voyage west,
head north, search south
find me the place
where the blue whale mates.

---

Hide

Sue Rose-Wray

Exotic as olives, oily and smooth,
dark as peppercorns, brown as ripe berries.
Caramel, coffee or cream with a dash
flushing, blushingly pink as tea roses.
Here’s sensation, insulation, regulation –
cut it, watch it quicken heal and scar,
touch it, feel it shiver and tremble –
is this who you think you really are?
The lesser-spotted pigmentation,
which some men love to hate –
embroider it, blue it with tattoos;
sailing ships, a sweetheart, your best mate,
     your mum. Or a sequence of numbers or two
     etched on an arm or a lampshade made of Jew.