Eight
On its own the glove crawls, a black vampire squid, a five fingered submarine.
I walk alone to Cudden Point, later drink a beer with its legend on the label,
While a soaring diagram of terns unfolds over a dragon’s back. In Wales,
The superhuman kit is packed away in the darkness for a display, later.
The dismay of completion, like the farmer’s explosion; blowing up the squid
With dynamite he exchanged for a cow. Now, OK, the sheep are safe, but we are,
All of us, un-lucked, unbuckled from black fortune, the deep forest is dismayed.
Diminished by the sharp hierarchy of our ordering, squeezing itself between packets of automobile,
The creeping thing bends its limbs into its brain, consumed by itself if caged,
A hand-mind landmine of sheep-eating genius loci, it is defiant in its colony, enraged,
Suckered and suppressed. While, here, the breeze hovers on its knees, nerves to the ground,
Stretched out like a hawk, while a stentorian sheep chases crows to an edge and stops.
The smell of cabbages; death is near. Nimble the sentinel preens, sharp as a child’s cot,
Chasing black dots in the wind, and is thrown back by the last gasps of storm. I finish the beer,
Turn the bottle around, the beast is blown to pieces at the bottom of the cliff,
We are safe, yet bowed, I bend through green tunnels of thorns to make it home.
The reaction works in both directions, the roots erode, the eyes open up
In the finger tips, the one lens inside is alive in its sleeve of slats and bones.
You are in the river, then up the steps, when the batteries stop; a black angel, haloed in wool,
Reflected in a fleet of golden leaves; in a world thrown upside down, you stand up.