A FOX THOUGHT

For Ted Hughes

I imagine the landscape of your poems:

A sacred wood, a pagan burial ground

Where the eyes of wild lifeblood red

devour prey.  Surrounded by the darkness

of gothic tales.  Cold moons fall on

a perpetual November sky.

Winter soil on your chalk-white flesh

Deep in the womb of your savage earth.

The nonchalant delight of your toil, free

from the vulva noose.  That something

else is alive unseen, black velvet feathers

oiled in crude sway within black rainbows

And peck your birds-eye tomb vision.

TRAGIC-BEAUTY

For Janice x

Waiting for the Tory island ferry.

We sat on the concrete steps

Leading down to the sea.

Looking into its depth was like

Seeing through a concave glass.

Piles of distorted dogfish, heaped

On the ocean floor, huddled

together in the oblong shape

of the plastic trays that littered

the harbor. Large black crab

scurried cross their limp under-

bellies. It all seemed like a waste

below the spillage of diesel on

water. James Simmons my men-

tor sat beside me. Somehow,

I knew that the sight of those dog-

Fish conjured images of his daughter

Crushed by a horse somewhere in

Denmark. The scent of fish and drying

Blood lingered in my nostrils reflecting

A melancholy aroma. The gang- plank

Went out and we scurried aboard.

I was glad to leave the harbor behind

Although the waste twisted with me

Through the craggy inlets of Donegal.

The sun beat down on tory, on the tiny

Islands or our exposed skin.  The children

Played freely on the dust road, the bar-

Man hosed down. There was a tragic-beauty

In the cliff face I remembered from Donegal.

It was a shame to leave Tory behind, good

Guinness, the Irish language like I’ve never

Heard before and the small wonderful

Sense of the island's freedom.