by Jacob Polley
of the sky, small
panes of it where the
tarmac gives out
he returns
nowhere to somewhere by
standing there
in sunlight, its flicking
over him like
likelike
he’s been this way
before he couldn’t
remember any way but
onwards and upwind
along a fence-line
to see what’s hanging, down
in a ditch where the still
dark stands
Peewit
a little one
drab
barely skyborne, with nothing
of the gut-unravelling acumen
of the scavenger
this is Jackself
limping across marshland, making a decoy
of himself, piping up when the day goes dim
so close to the ground he’s almost it
small wonder Peewit
is the name the other boys have given him
not Jackdaw, not Rook
the gods of bracken and fly-tipped
black plastic sacks will expose themselves to the pilgrim
who has faith in the star
at the centre of the crab apple, in the ditchful
of frogspawn and the shed door
hinged with spiders’ webs
so it comes to pass
for Peewit, whippy stick in his right hand
as he tramps the far-out lanes with those
who had diminished him,
a breeze
starts to ratch in the dust
the foxglove
jangles
his legs
break and he goes down, his eyes a white
flutter in his head
the boys circle him
where he fits,
grinding his teeth so hard they sing
and when they heft him,
heavier than he should be,
his bird-soul batters
into him
they process so slowly the light’s
all gone by halfway home
when
Peewit’s no longer between them
has flown
and blank with terror
the boys go round and round
in the dark and cold and are not ever found
The Goose Shed
Jackself finds Jeremy Wren
in the goose shed
who the fuck
has a goose shed, Wren says
people with geese,
Jackself says
he’s standing in the bright
door square, his shadow-self
monstered against the dim back wall
where Wren crouches, stringy knees
drawn up to his chin
where are they then, Wren says
Jackself looks at his shoes
they prefer not to use
the goose shed, he says
it’s true the goose and gander hiss
and thrash with blazing wings
anyone who dares set foot
on Lamanby’s yard,
but they nest in among
the elder brush behind the barn
while the ghost shed
is where Jackself comes to hunker down
in the gold straw
and watch Lamanby’s sandstone doorstep
and red front door,
as if from outside his own life and not
minding as it goes on without him
you mean
the goose shed, Wren says
everybody’s got
a ghost shed
have they, Jackself says, taken aback
yeah,
course, Wren says
somewhere
to take yourself off to, just close enough
to hear your mum,
dad, brother and sister
laughing
but not to make out
what they’re laughing at
it wouldn’t be right,
he says, to overhear
no, Jackself says,
but what are you doing in my shed
I’m looking for ghost eggs, Wren says,
and you’re standing in my light
Nightlines
Jackself and Jeremy Wren are setting
nightlines in the kidney-coloured pool
all the streams of England run into
Jackself’s fretting
all night the guiled
will hang, their hooked lips
mouthing into the waterworks and bloodstreams
of all England
all night, gaffed,
their bullion flexing
until Jeremy Wren
bashes them at dawn with his hardwood priest
Wren,
who says his granddad built the southern domes
Jesus needed to stable His beasts,
thinks Jackself’s a soft-lad, a quick-
tear, a worry-wit,
and ties off another triple-barbed spinner
so Jackself rolls up his jeans,
takes one end of the nylon line looped to a tent peg and
wades into the chuckling shallows
slippery-stoned ice-cool
fishpath where no one has stood
for a thousand years
when Wren’s not looking
Jackself stamps his foot
and all the carp and sticklebacks, the perch and pike and bream
are shaken out
of their gullible, muddy-minded dream
Cheapjack
as an elephant has memory
so Jeremy Wren has merchandise
in his pocket, an order book,
a Biro behind his ear, and in his palm
a matchbox from which he offers
Jackself the patter, eight-legged
and shrivelled like a dead
star
wrap your tongue round this,
he says, and sell a man
a second shadow
isn’t it an old spider,
Jackself says
you have to learn to overlook
your own eyes,
Wren says, otherwise
you’ll never live the life you might
he slides shut the little drawer
and stows the matchbox back in his jacket
that night
Jackself lies awake,
his commercial inhibitions coming undone
in the dark and hiss of the rain
and next day at school he’s barking the corridor
in a sandwich board that proclaims
a belt of Eden serpent’s skin
a fairy’s skull, a stone age stone
a map of sleep, a stick of rock
from Pompeii’s only sweetie shop
a pick n mix of famous stains
a hanged man’s jerk, a traffic cone
a bedbug from the riverbed
an ominous pencil, a furry mint
the last gold hair from Satan’s head
The Whispering Garden
listen to those hollyhocks
those lupins,
Wren says
I’ve watched the bees
stealing in and out
with their furry microphones
to record the voices inside
I’ve put my ear to the box
where they take the noise
only to be warned
that an eye
was on me
all the time
look!
he says, scrambling to his feet
in the crook
of Jackself’s elbow
a Wall Brown butterfly
blinking its wings
It
tell us what’s wrong, Jeremy Wren,
crouched in the corner, spitting no blood,
robust in bladder and bowel, your toes
&nbs
p; untouched by fire or flood
no cold wind blows
there’s hair on your feet and mint
in your groin and tonight
is milk, tomorrow cream
and the day after that
a herd that lows
from your very own
meadowland of light
your head doesn’t hurt
though it’s bigger inside
than out
Jeremy Wren,
whole of heart,
tell us what pains you
my hole is bigger inside than out
and the heart of my pain
is a black bull’s heart
and the tongue of my pain
a black bull’s tongue that every day
licks off the cream
of the light
there’s hair in my bowel and doubt
in my groin and my head’s full of
animal glue
I’m spending my face
on people of fire
who visit at night
to stare at my emptiest place
while I crouch in the corner
and read my own spit
with a torch for a clue
that’s it
Les Symbolistes
way out among the hedgerows, Jackself
and Jeremy Wren, drunk
on white cider and Malibu,
are kicking up dust, the froth
of the cow-parsley spunk
or cuffs of sweat-yellowed cambric,
the seamy side ablaze in the moonlight
and fancy words on Jackself’s tongue
now the locks of his head are picked
and the distance he’s kept from his different selves
is all undone
how good it feels to be French
and deranged, swinging the empty crock
of his desire
what the fuck,
Wren says
my dad sniffed fag-
smoke on my breath and made me eat
a twenty pack, then welted me
buckle-first
when I asked what was for sweet
fie, foh and fum
I smell your backwash in the coconut rum
Jackself giggles and tilts the bottle nightwards
starburst
and the spinning moon’s bone china rim
my dad sniffed himself
on me, Jackself says, and made me eat him
carved so thin
I could read a rose-tinted poem through each slice
A POEM! Wren roars
you’re creepy as a two-headed calf
and I’ve always thought so
but Jackself’s bent double
in the dark, clutching his thighs,
a silver thread unspooling from his chin
around him maze the midnight lonnings
of reasonable England
see, Wren says, clapping Jackself on the back
as he retches
that’s a proper poem for you
agony to bring up,
with real carrots in it
An Age
Jackself is staying in
today, like a tool in a toolbox,
to try to just be
high in the lovely lofts
of Lamanby
he stands at a cracked
window watching the gulls
flash and snap, like washing on a line
in the pale heat
the wormy heartwood floorboards
swell and creak
he stands for an age
not for a dark age,
not for an ice age or an iron age, but for a
pollen age, when bees
browsed the workshops
of wildflowers for powder
of light, and the cables
of a spider’s web were dusted with gold
by the unreceptacled breeze
Jack Frost
Jackself is tapping
fractals of ice, ice
ferns and berries of ice,
onto windowpanes and door handles, doorsteps,
grass blades and the postbox as he walks
the November village after midnight
he’s wearing his homemade thousand-milk-bottle-top
winter suit,
complete with epaulettes
of copper wire, and the lametta wig
he’s kept all year in the Auto-Arctic Unit
that hums in the cellar beneath Lamanby
but it’s hard going, all this tapping every boot-scraper
and hubcap, and 3 a.m. finds Jackself
with his silvery head
in his hands, slumped on the unspun roundabout
among the gallows-poles of the moonlit playground,
the stars grinding on above him
his suit tinkles as he shivers
would it really all go to shit
if he went home before sunrise, leaving untouched a gutter-trickle
here or a windscreen there
fuck it
Jackself wants a hot chocolate and a digestive biscuit
he wants his bed
and doesn’t need to be doing this
cold scrollwork,
this archiving
of air bubbles
and tatty leaves
he hauls himself to his feet, gives
the roundabout a heave
and crunches across the grass
but who’s this weaving down the empty road
wearing snow-globe deely boppers, a mantle of tinsel and gauntlets and greaves
of kitchen foil
it’s Jeremy Wren,
waving a glitter-sprinkled wooden spoon
at the wing-mirrors of parked cars and the street lamp’s
long case, baking them in frost
you look a proper sight, Jackself says
Wren’s weeping the lucid mask that’s welding to his cheekbones
help me, he says, keep everything just as it is
Plantation
Jackself’s chinning
into the near-dark north wind
and feels it drawing silver thorns
from the corners of his eyes
he hunches
deeper into his parka,
deeper into his lion’s mane
hood
I’m in the wilderness
no, he says,
I am the wilderness, where stray
greyhounds, scrawny prophets
and secret-keepers walk cold acres
hunting shelter under a welder’s
mask moon, motherless
and fatherless, with no cupboard of sweetcorn
and baked-bean tins, no airtight
canisters of shortbread
no baubles, no toilet paper, no featherbed
what would a turned-out
greyhound want with baubles and toilet paper
concave and zithery, they’re the hounds
Jackself knows from the kennels down the lane
and, knowing no prophets,
he imagines a greyhound-ish
greybeard up on his withered hind legs
and leaning on a chewed dog-stick
to howl like the wind that’s threshing these
trees, grown too fearsome to be Christmas trees
Blackjack
it’s rained for days and Jackself
is standing under Lamanby’s dripping eaves
to ask all
his dark questions in one go
where does the toilet water take
his tapped-out gold, how many eggs
are laid by spiders at night in his nose
and did the bathwater once carry
his mucky portrait
(a skin on the water’s surface, like engine oil)
down
down into galleries
of fungal brick, where a frog-faced haaf-
netter stood, mi
dstream, to haul
the likeness of Jackself’s naked body
from the current on an old bedsheet
and pin it up with the thousand others,
contorted on the sewer walls
Jackself shudders
to be known secretly,
intimately
to be chronicled
get a grip
who’d be interested in where I stand or what
I eat
or if my bathwater tastes, as it does, of lime cordial
