This Is Probably About What You Think It’s About

Step down with me into this poem
Air steps into wild
Forest where the birds fleet
The green shallows
Have no care
Step down and put your foot on the good dirt
Let it spring up and writhe
under your weight and release
tiny Bakelite spoons in all directions as you go
Stride through the poem
Watch as it snaps open for you, each
Bud and branch peeling wide
Pink and white and seething, each blue stone
Shuddering and falling out from the walls of the ruin
Like eyes falling into oblivion
This poem is a calling into virgin wonder
An acoustic disaster of overdue violins
A waiting room of heaving foliage
And impossible twisting paths
There has never been anywhere better
For you and your burden
Of a soul and its lesions
bought (for 5 reals) from a chup-chup vendor
At the entrance to the nature preserve
Beyond which this poem sprawls
Only for you
In ghastly tenderness, a rolling
Constantly renewing psychosexual space
Now you are here
There is no need for any other place
Let the poem collapse around you
So many woods clapping for you
As they go blithely crumbling inward
Let it be green the last that you see
And peaceful the river rise over your
Dense and reflexive occupying form
 
 
 
Helen McClory’s first story collection, On the Edges of Vision, won the Saltire First Book of the Year 2015. Her second story collection, Mayhem & Death, was written for the lonely and published in March 2018. The poetry is coming. There is a moor and a cold sea in her heart. Find her here.