Object Poem #5/nursery rhyme series

Dainty Dish

out of my deep fluted lungs fly four     
& twenty blackbirds/like a pop-          
out birthday cake nobody                      
w(ants)/one for sorrow, two                  
for mirth, three for… /all                  
the noses pecked
unseemly 
in the
flour

garden where pockets of rye upend   
sixpence of root vegetables             
gamey m(eats)/the odds & ends               
collecting to yoke a                       
crusted sheet over          
an ortolan                          
for the king’s
pye nest
flap.
 

Object Poem #6/nursery rhyme series 

Pail

You you youououou
      ououou
                 ououo
          u
                   ou
                o
                   u
          O
             are no wet cooper, hole-sprung 
the dark fish rock bite of lichen/air collapsing between metal-hooped ribs/
lung-sprung echo/
no muscle oaken to stave the leviathan drip/I take on 
white pebbles in death’s aquarium 
                     but for a moment I nursed the grinning look in your eye, Jack
Jill, before I 
fell 
too/tumbling  
down the fungal crown of the well/no rickety windlass will set the bones/
no vinegar & brown paper will mend the holes/
     just water   water   water fetched to sink/I look 
up spring-trapped to no reflection. 
 

and before them asks the peat harvester


The days are wet and acidic. Outstretched, the flaming orange-red tendril of the sundew plant snares a Scottish midge. The bog sustains its landscape as I cut turf—peat to burn and iron ore to make swords and cauldrons, shields. The crusted land weeps hacked bone. Tablet-woven braids of sphagnum moss drift between land and water. 

On the horizon, across the tarn, bird-stuffed clouds are borne on a northerly wind. I shovel and tusker, unlayering the earth’s buttery black core. Soft, pulpy trees buckle out of the peat maw. A wet nest of swamp roots pull and tug at the ball of my heel. I billhook and brick and dry neat walls of landscaped flesh on banks of heather. The bog glows like the plumage of luminous owls. With each peat brick it wispily exhales the miasma of rewetted rituals. 

in the bog body
barley, linseed and knotweed 
written for the gods. 
 

thin cushion between rock and air

Abroche/a biological structure making 
cements out of carbon
springtails nymphalids dipluran poised & sprung like wind horses

the invisible dream architecture of soil animals/mineral particles spidered into pores & passag-es/tiny clumps of hibernaculum are building blocks for bigger labyrinths/beaver dams/wasps nests/rhizosphere the plant’s external gut. 

At night/Swedenborg pushes nails into the dirt 
& hops across the lawn with head cocked like a bird
listening for the inner order of the world, the biotremology of how matter relates to spirit 

as immortal jellyfish reorganize themselves into new kingdoms.
 

the goldilocks zone

O! dive
{{{{{ doun
{{{{{{{{{{ dreepin 

guillemot, manx shearwater
into the boundary between mixed & stratified water/scrapefoot 
the intersection of shoaling clupeids

margins change through the column/inner 
edges of tidal fronts unmoored/0.99 AV-1.7 AV/
zombie ice vagrant

dive
///// doun
////////// dreepin         

the dinosaur bridge spans the meltwater
whaur bears hunt porridge under a stagnant lid.