The Field
This lane can’t help but lead
onto that lane I followed
when I was nine, stretched to green
fields from my aunt’s farm
along the hedgeway that gives,
through a gap, to a blackthorn-guarded glade
where my catty older cousin says he’ll drop me
from the roof of the cow barn onto the cows
if I don’t follow the rules and chant
‘Rise wormwood eyes’ thirty-three times
with eyes shut so the dead can crawl
from the ground where they were murdered.
Sunlight streaks through the copse,
dribbles over honeysuckle
as a cabbage white flickers, a nervous
hand over black sloes; and under bridal-
white fluttering leaves I wheeze
‘Rise wood dies’ and half-open my eyes.
From the axe wound of a fungal
tree-stump they creep with bramble
fingers, bedstraw genitals, leaking hedge-
parsley. Light melts through their gaped
flowers, their tongues of ret flax.
My hidden cousin wets his kecks.
My mother played in those feeding
grounds as a child before upping sticks
for the city. Staying at the house
of her birth for the holidays, my aunt
had proposed a picnic. And I would
follow the lane, enter the green field,
join those women in the meadow clover
and columbine, rings on their fingers
like marigolds, breaking fresh bread
but I shrink in the glade, waiting to be ravelled
with furze-brake and thorn-roots and to twist
for the rest of my days in this wake of the dead.