Cathy
you wild you
kept on going you
truly weren’t I think -
stifled yourself
half to death
and died
your
muddy clogs off
in the dark
borderless yard
spat and snarled yet
never whole
was wasted land
a mouth of soil
and broken neatly
down the middle-
yr breasts
got eaten
and kept
and corseted
in thorn and title
while fold-dark skies
kept on and splashing on
for what?
to this-
kicking at the walls
like a
muzzled halfling-
you don’t know
or even fancy
the landscape in a man
full of hate- this
drawing room of sexless
paisley
like nothing else could do-
are you disabled?
in hills and crinoline
to love only man
or man-
would the real live space
of moorless you
go empty without
clamour?
2 comments:
I really liked
"kicking at the walls
like a
muzzled halfling-
you don’t know
or even fancy
the landscape in a man
full of hate- this
drawing room of sexless
paisley"
Sexless paisley is ace. And I don't get to say that enough.
I've been working on a Wuthering Heights poem this week as well. I have to produce a series of poems for my theatre in Newcastle, so I'm doing them roughly on the theme of adaptation. So I'm currently trying to find the missing link between the novel and Kate Bush's expressive dance routine. Poems not going well but I'm enjoying reading the novel again.
Not really on death, but I'd thought I'd post this seeing as I've just finished a first draft:
Wuthering Heights
Severed? Grey? Looking for vengeance?
Come to the blasted barrows of Halifax;
Those vast, familiar, crumpled pages
that scream down onto the black stone cottages.
Spend a summer under that unforgiving score;
all wind and brass and mysterioso cello. Bring your children.
Bring a photo to smash. Watch poets stand on opposing stones,
reciting long hateful poems about what they are doing there.
Look strong on the heath as foxes regurgitate librettos,
See harrowing lithographs, thrashed into thorn bushes,
Fields framing horses with painful faces,
The youth choir staggering about on the rocks.
See Ralph Fiennes peer from a shattered window,
As Lawrence Olivier and Timothy Dalton,
eyes screwed beneath potblack chevrons,
fight over a handkerchief in the yard.
Marvel as a black Nelly Dean and a white Nelly Dean
accidentally swap kitchens, a conga of decrepit
Josephs hulking through the ruins of Gimmerden Chapel
like The Origins of Man set to a bastard hymn.
Pity young Catherine upon her return from Thrushcross Grange,
all curtsey and crinoline, as she finds her beloved soulmate
has become a permed, 7th century Japanese slave,
in the charge of priests who worship a Mountain of Fire.
No ghosts of the past here. Just new adaptations
running through their lines in the fog,
Crisscrossing the moor, flashbacks dovetailing,
Barely room for a red dress to limbo between them.
You’ll find no privacy out here, squires.
No time for madness, no open space.
Just the high etiquette of hatred, the well-ploughed furrows
That steer the blood from the head to the grave.
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