Image: © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester
I Heard Her Drumming in the Spring
Haw frost comes
and light snow dusts
the solid ground.
I take paper bags
of peanuts,
sunflower seeds —
black, unhusked
— and do the job
you used to do.
I fill the feeders
hung on a stumpy
ash tree — a pollard
we cut years ago.
Binoculars, yours,
sit on my desk
and later I stop,
at intervals,
to look up and focus
on Blue, Great,
Long-tailed, and
black capped Coal Tits,
and one returning
Nuthatch; blue backed
and blush bellied,
with his robbers mask.
Then a bird I thought
I knew, bigger,
white and black,
long billed — a robust,
business-like spike.
I take your Book
of British Birds
— Woodpecker,
Lesser Spotted, female.
Unlike her mate
she wears no red;
the book says secretive,
hard to observe.
Georgia O’Keeffe on the roof of her penthouse, New York, June 5th, 1936
I open my eyes to Georgia and Skull,
her oiled hair, his bleached horns.
She is in prayer with the bull,
or with his state of death and hard bone.
Georgia rests her brow, her eyes closed,
against his cheek, and cups
his muzzle with the open fingers
of her right hand.
Her dark hair, his orbital bones, which,
from my view,
still may contain lashed eyes
that hold her in his downward gaze.
The diagonal line
of the muscle of her neck,
its definite line in the turn of her head,
her forehead, her eyelids, her
moment of love
with the beast whose skull adorns
the brick wall of her roof terrace,
miles from open grasslands.
What Remains
The hollow apple tree leans, propped
on a forked ash limb. I pruned her branches
to counterweight the fifty degree pull
towards ground, her halfway stance
between sky and grave, and hung her
with a set of metal chimes to force the wind
to speak your voice. When a spark
from a bonfire I made to burn
your accumulation of boxes and baskets
leapt into her hollow, caught, blackened it
to a charnel cave, I knew I’d committed a sin
— against the tree, my heart, and you.
It could be a cleansing a friend said,
and in May the tree did flower,
five-petalled flush.
____
Rebecca Althaus is a research student at Falmouth University working on a collection about grieving, identity and place. Her poetry has been highly commended in The Poetry Business 2021 International Book & Pamphlet Competition and published in The North, Tears in the Fence and Raceme.