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THE
BLOOD RULES
(For full text see
the Kindle ebook The
Nature of Things (Collected Poems) by Alan Marshfield)
Prelude
1
Dragging
through city or sea
the
animal soup of pain
too
excessive for warning
...
2
Who
knows
perhaps
you too are repeating
perhaps
fish into reptiles were
a
fallout left
...
3
But
such inspiration
a
radiance more maniacal than
the
genes it alters
is
hard to believe in
...
Pain
1
I
am the terrified ache
in
an average habitat
monkey
that falls when the tree breaks
...
2
You
are a phantom
you
are imagination
a
presence yellower at nightfall
that
I see sometimes by looking away
...
3
Smell
of pig-swill petrol swedes
lorries
with their hair in nets and curlers
a
hall full of apples set in blue satin
...
4
St
Olave’s crypt cold low and bare
floats
out of the wall a primitive pietà
...
5
I
alchemist on a fir-covered isle
a
wheeze tied with muslin
have
the gone-off smell of the gone mad
...
Light
1
The
stream runs scummy beneath the mill-walls
the
width of the ford a stagnant light
near
the malt reeds
...
2
You
the bird I the blood
and
you are leaving
...
3
I
have a door open onto the hot forest
and
its immigrant sweat of odours
the
tiles sprout buds birds
...
4
These
half-lights may soon be over
the
sky is at last allowing its purple
to
glare on the horizon
...
Fear
1
Butterflies
feed
on
a flutter of colour
...
2
The
boxer crouches like a man paying a taxi
eyes
as if in a fog of underground torment
...
3
If
it moves kill it
If
it is silent commend
...
4
A
blind alley not three shoulders wide
cocks
at the sky a funnel
rusty
drainpipes like varicose veins
still
work the body of black brick
...
5
A
bird’s fossil in the dense sea-groyne
of
the city’s eroded forest
stained
black and scraped with a chemical
...
Coda
1
See
that you remember my pain
so
much of it there has been so much
...
2
On
the cliff-top in a volcanic moon
an
acropolis writhes in the damp nightfall
...
(For full text
see the Kindle ebook
The Nature of Things
(Collected Poems) by Alan Marshfield)
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