Heron

Mark Rutter

Feathered skeleton
with anorexic
legs.

Flying
the moray eel neck
hangs
in the shape of a noose.

The ribcage
is a jailhouse.
Each wing feather’s
a fossil leaf
chipped out of slate.

The anti-stork.
Voice all rattling locks
and no keys.

Eyes of ice fog
measure my blueprint
of bones.
The flesh-free beak
is a pair of scissors.

I see it in the doorway
with a briefcase full of life
insurance policies
tucked under its wing.

It wants to flap off
with my soul a
lump
sliding down its
elasticated gullet.

---

The Cooling

Mark Rutter

I ride the train past the town of my childhood
and the cooling towers, like corseted women
glide across the fields
steaming a froth of veils – three
industrial muses.

Their temple is shattered now –
smashed windows mouthing only
the wind’s syllables.
Still they watch over us
those concrete crinolines.

The factories they powered are extinct.
We no longer believe in them
but they stalk our dreams
massive as the monuments
to the Egyptian kings.

Brutalist manikins, they midwived me
into the midlands –
I played in its rhythms,
its motherly metal heartbeats,
its furnace-womb bore me.

By a torrent of lorries, in a thicket
of transistors, hymned
by the aluminium harmonies
of the jet engine, into the star roads
traversed by Telstar their crowns

rose and took possession
of this anthill realm
like three chess queens,
those concrete hourglasses
my modernist godmothers.

---

Highland Cattle

Mark Rutter

Tempting to see in them
a barbaric magnificence –
brawny as megaliths,
prong-horned as aurochs;
spread out on the grass, the herd
the model for the first stone circles.
But there is more fierceness
in a stag-headed oak. Millennia
of breeding has hooked a yoke
around walnut brains that hunker
down under skull-plates thick as shields.
Mildly they chew the cud
contented by a spot of sun
on fenced-in field or picnic common.
The matted dossan falls cutely over
eyes that can't remember
what it was to be the moor-stepper,
the high-souled beast
of which the rune poet sang.
Though I too am fat on the milk
and honey of civilisation
something in me yearns
to see them rise and head-charge
the tidy village and its properties
like so much expensive china.

---

After the Flood

Mark Rutter

The year’s last pond skaters
ride surface tension in the shallows
their time almost up –
do they know it?
Everything keeps on living
right to the last moment
tao of the river.

Pull down thy vanity
our lives are just a glimpse
in the mind of the oak
armoured in leaves through autumn
parched throat all summer
where only the rook croaks
tao of the river.

Last beech leaves absorb
and refract, oak leaves burnish,
ash leaves chip away
at the light. In the smooth, dried mud,
enough deer-slot cuneiform
to translate into an epic
tao of the river.

---

Long Barrow

Mark Rutter

Bunker of the sheltering dead –
as if they could, in chalk caskets,
outwait the bombs of mortality

to roll aside the barrow stone
and admit the quiet light at last,
the blitz of history over.

---

Reading the Difficult Poet

Mark Rutter

Ink-thicket. Word-hedge. Black twigs interknitted,
impassable. Trebraid, the Irish used to say,
‘well-woven’. Braided trees. Branches trained
to twine. Long wood-ropes. Knots. In the time
it takes to eat an apple, take a look
at the consonant-copse, thick-rooted vowel-orchard.
The seeds of meaning will pass through
undigested, barely stained by mind’s acids,
germinate in the ground of language.

---