A.E. Stallings

(after visiting The World of Stonehenge at the British Museum)

For Ange Mlinko

When did museums devolve to the didacticSpelling out our wonder? Not enoughTo show us something wonderful – the tacticIs multimedia to smooth the roughEdges of the imagination – ‘thwacks’Piped in to whet the silence of an axe,

Or see: those skeletons of ponderous oxenSacrificed still...

Graveyard of St Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund Hall

For E.M.

Snowdrop, snowdrop, tell:what news of the underground,the weather in Hell?

Your toes are tickledby the beards of the dead, theirslanted stones deckled

and foxed with lichen-rings of shaggy galaxies.In flocks you beckon

me to read shallow-graven names on time-thumbed tomes.Soon you’ll sallow, snow-

drop: now so new, yetyour hair’s...

Hooded Crow: Corvus cornix

On windy days the crows cavortDown slides of air for autumn sport.They dive and spiral, twirl and spin,Then levitate to ride again.

That wind that makes their airy slideComes tumbling down the mountainside,Tousles the heads of trees and dropsTo the sea beyond the cypress tops,

And drinking at the sea’s blue lipsMakes paper sailboats out of...

I bought an antique sieve of hammered tinFor its decorative holes

Patterned like a flower, or a star explodingAt one of the poles.

I think of all it has sifted: flour and sugar,Dust and light,

What must be ground so fine, so fine! to pass through –Milled, contrite.

Light and time it has sifted, like a metal welkinOf punctual stars,

The cold hieroglyphs of the constellations,The raised scars

On...

Warmer and warmercreep the late Januarys,disturbed beauty of

precocious flowers,the ease of a year’s first swim.Pulsing in their silk

tent in the tree’s crotchthe pine processionariesbegin to emerge

head to tail to headto tail, inevitableas cause and effect,

the rungs of numbers.Column of janissaries,they pour like roller

coasters or compoundcentipedes, devouring morerange each year,...