Ian Davidson
I SAW IT ALL AND IT WAS MOVING
Buy land, they are not making any more. Mark Twain
1.
Many ways to come into land
Land revealed as layers patiently
brushed aside or scoured by a storm
from far at sea,
the friction from little divils
riding the waves.
2.
Branches lift their toes and teeter,
otters follow leaving scent on an
underwater track to a rocky mouth of
broken teeth that gapes open
at all angles, seawater washing
foaming down the gullet past rocky ribs.
3.
The fallen angels gather round,
broken rocks become teeth that
become an impossible airway for
an expanding globe where wings
just begin to catch air, just begin
to lift off the surface.
The sea breathes as sand falls
to the seabed as a curtain,
islands loom closer then disappear,
sand is covered then discovered,
making land anywhere.
AS IF AGAIN
Sprinting to escape fate
and the biology that bugs.
Maybe freedom is not, as
Blake may have said,
inside you, but a
collect call, a
distant
disembodied voice
you have to pay
for and lets you
off the hook.
Or freedom is
found in the
sound of a
hummingbird,
moving in and out
of the hive of leaves
we come to call book,
looking for others lives
with the honey
of the past dripping
from fingers soiled
on real parchment.
This is not the knotted
work of arms with
rolled cuffs, sleeves
to the elbows
digging a trench
or cutting warm peat
or fixing the raspberry cage
with whatever comes to hand,
but the double-sided fork tongued
work like words on a page, telling
the story as if plain fact, as if
anything can happen.
Buy land, they are not making any more. Mark Twain
1.
Many ways to come into land
Land revealed as layers patiently
brushed aside or scoured by a storm
from far at sea,
the friction from little divils
riding the waves.
2.
Branches lift their toes and teeter,
otters follow leaving scent on an
underwater track to a rocky mouth of
broken teeth that gapes open
at all angles, seawater washing
foaming down the gullet past rocky ribs.
3.
The fallen angels gather round,
broken rocks become teeth that
become an impossible airway for
an expanding globe where wings
just begin to catch air, just begin
to lift off the surface.
The sea breathes as sand falls
to the seabed as a curtain,
islands loom closer then disappear,
sand is covered then discovered,
making land anywhere.
AS IF AGAIN
Sprinting to escape fate
and the biology that bugs.
Maybe freedom is not, as
Blake may have said,
inside you, but a
collect call, a
distant
disembodied voice
you have to pay
for and lets you
off the hook.
Or freedom is
found in the
sound of a
hummingbird,
moving in and out
of the hive of leaves
we come to call book,
looking for others lives
with the honey
of the past dripping
from fingers soiled
on real parchment.
This is not the knotted
work of arms with
rolled cuffs, sleeves
to the elbows
digging a trench
or cutting warm peat
or fixing the raspberry cage
with whatever comes to hand,
but the double-sided fork tongued
work like words on a page, telling
the story as if plain fact, as if
anything can happen.
© Copyright Ian Davidson 2021
Ian Davidson was brought up in north Wales, where he also lived for much of his adult life. After some years in Newcastle-upon-Tyne he now lives between a smallholding in southwest Mayo in Ireland and Dublin, where he teaches in UCD. His most recent publications are From a Council House in Connacht (Oystercatcher 2021) and By Tiny Twisting Ways (Aquifer 2021). His Selected Poems will be published by Shearsman and a collection will by Red Squirrel Press in 2022. He has also published monographs, articles and essays on modern and contemporary poetry, the most recent being an extended consideration of the work of Bill Griffiths in the Blackwell Companion to British and Irish Contemporary Poetry and an essay on Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters. You can see and hear him reading for Molly Bloom here.
