Carola Luther

4 Poems

Walking towards the Rochdale Canal

 

August hauls deep green dreaming
into the woods.
Even the bracken is so high and thick
I am up to my neck.
I feel its lure –
who doesn’t desire to trust
in what’s sprung, the emerald
caves, to lean in and be lost.

Clouds. Someone calling
their dog. Just here, I could be
in the clefts of Magoebaskloof
no, more Lekgalameetse, (called Malta
then, and The Downs). Trees hang
heavy, comatose with their own
inner workings, there are vines
hanging like boomslangs. I imagine

flashes – grenadilla, snare, hungry man
and a silent blue swordtail butterfly
blinking the eyes of this upturned
cauldron of leaves. I find the towpath.
Me, three ducks and the white
disturbance of that eight-foot swan-
shaped paddleboat stowed amongst nettles
on the opposite bank.

I can’t see the rain,
but can see it’s raining –
the green water receives it
with tiny pale mouths, fish lips
pulling down rain. Narrowboat
framed by the bridge. It’s come on
so quietly. From nowhere
the thought that it’s Stalkie inside,

Stalkie pulled straight
like a king laid out on a slab, kill-wounds
filled in and powdered by curators
of the dead. A hooded man
at the tiller staring ahead,
poncho beaded with rain.
I realise this myth is European.
It isn’t actually Stalkie in my mind,

I don’t know Stalkie now,
did he have guns, I hear
he was a peaceful man, but a farmer
will have a gun. I don’t think of his killers,
I don’t, they may have been desperate,
I heard they were from Mozambique
and high on drugs, for courage my brother
thought, breaking bones like they couldn’t

stop, and Stalkie, I haven’t seen Stalkie
for forty years. Square-shouldered boy
racing bare-foot with my bare-foot
brother, freckle-face, snub nose,
pocket full of goons, his tiny mother
teaching us to swim, big bosom
making bird-breast of her costume,
she died last year – 

Thank God for that my brother said. Her sister
grew northern hemisphere azaleas,
maples from America, acres
of European cherry blossom,
you remember the blossom
my brother said. I remember
standing ankle deep in light
petals cooling my feet.

In this boat is Stalkie, metaphor
for a world that once I knew
here,  in another country, this water
a Styx, a momentary Charon in the rained-on
Yorkshireman at the narrowboat tiller.
The man nods. I lift my arm
walk on quickly to Luddenden Foot,
turn up to Jerusalem Farm.

 

 

 

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