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CONJURER
I
give them to children to play with:
a
quick leg and a wing, pincer hooks
in
the tail, all sorts of distant kith
from
night bush and black-eyed research books.
I
expose them from my black top hat:
one
at a time. A sooty spider
as
convulsive as a rabbit, fat
in
woozy derricks, drunk on cider
from
bluebottles sipped on the sly.
Here,
children, under cover, put this
in
your jail jar. What next
now? Let’s try
to
dig a friend down I’ll never miss—
from
my wicked sleeve! Ah, ah, earwig….
D’you
like that? Screw the tin
top down tight.
You’ll
find him ambered in a vain rig;
he’ll
surrender without a fight.
The
dears, they never tire me. Each
year
they
are born back in their medium,
my
person and clothes. Here, never fear
the
cost, there’s none, none. Take
some, take some.
Children,
screw the lid tight. Remember
the
bot fly, gad fly, fritillaries,
the
drone, puss moth, the mottled umber,
the
dung fly, the hive and humble bees.
These,
take, children. Kill, study, discard.
You
can’t eat them all, or study all
or
discard them all, the speckle and shard.
Give
them a piece of your mind, then crawl
upstairs
to bed. From what nightmare
cloth
shall
I then pluck you to show to the stars?
Will
you hunch pale by your friend the moth?
With
what slack bowels? And in what jars?
Alan
Marshfield
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