Palatinate Poetry: Undergrowth
The stirring of earth — then
The birth of a single white shoot,
Stark as bone,
One bud sprouting upwards,
Determined, triumphant.
Silt and clay crumble,
Give way to the growth
As one shoot becomes four —
Five — twisting, writhing
From the root to which they are wedded,
Joined by a hand, a wrist,
An arm…
Galvanised, they rise. Now
A twin wrist of fingers springs up
Beside them, a hot white bolt of lightning,
The ivory bride of the first
Clothed in a veil of dust.
Hands clutching the ground, with an almighty push
A head starts to surface, a crest of earth breaking,
Tumbling, falling
Over the appalling shape that comes stubbornly crawling.
A cracked-glass cry rattles through that mottled, globular
Husk that once housed a mind, resounding
Through a jumbled framework — leased-out white clapboard, clumsily stacked —
That continues to climb with a drive
That defies the want for eyes.
Stumbling through the undergrowth,
The eyeless, lipless, lumbering scaffolding
Sheds foliage and dirt and cadaverine
Like desires and anxieties, leaving them to slip,
To sink, to seep into soil
For which this being has as little need
As the fleeting mortal cloak
It shrugged off long ago.
Instinct brings it lurching
Towards a glow of warmth, towards
A window, to trace the glass pane
Displaying that familiar congregation
Of faces
Lately engraved
With the grey lines
Of time; age-worn, grief-worn, worn
Out,
To tap the divide between within and without,
Impassible.
Impossible to see that one inside
Is standing – right there – on the other side,
But does not shout;
In the gloom, she has mistaken it
For a mirror. She retreats into the room
As she pulls shut the curtains
And turns the light out.
Image by PapaPiper via Flickr Creative Commons
