From The Dance of Ararat
Ice Bear Dreams
She is a cub again on
the long swim south
treading in the dark
wake of her mother.
Stars rain down, hissing
out in the seawater.
Unending rutting. His
claws pinch her,
so parched she jaws the
powdery drift,
and watches steam plume
from her lips.
Her footing slips at the
foot of the cliff
She tumbles skywards
past the rank nests
of kittiwakes and the
screeching auklets.
Inside
each beached whale there is a pit
where
the bodies of her long-dead cubs
live
peering between the blubbery ribs.
Her paws shrink to a
seal’s black nubs.
She breathes water and is
untouchable.
Bears lumber after her
in the blue chill.
Bawling
toothlessly she watches her kill
stripped by
foxes down to the bare bones,
but cannot
lift her paws up from the snow.
Horking beached blubber
down her throat,
she hears the whale’s
lungs. It’s soft breath
is indistinguishable
from her mother’s breath.
The ice is gone. The
males have stayed south
to sweat and brawl on
the drylands forever,
and left her to mewl
cubless on the gravel.
The moon burns the
blizzard at eyelevel,
until the snow leaves
her and the moon alone.
It’s skin is as warm as
a teat against her nose.
From The Salt Harvest
Cockles
Take the orange meat into your muscled spaces.
Five years they filtered sewage on Morecambe flats,
nestled as dense as teeth against strong tidal scrapes,
counting the oilspills, until Yu Hui slapped his plank
and bore them up by griddle and craam in the early stars,
Yu Hui who ended in sand as wind blasted North off the map,
stilling the tubes of his cochleae cordis. Tear them apart,
boiled in cream and crushed with garlic on your sideplate,
alive oh, to feed the crusted bivalves of your heart.