what belongs to me I keep:
my old love
where intimacy creeps
as if to a body buried
                in the woods

to become so lost so close to
where I started
encaged among the twigs &
     dormant buds
                   like a great bird;
stridor of trees scouring themselves
     into wounds, the
tips of the branches breaking to
forked tongues of flame,
clatrian of sheet-metal foliage as a
cenozoic moon spirals toward
     fimbulwinter
into pitch scary black

      tallness
trying to pull down the sky
                   with its iron claws

conjoined we were in this
a boundlessness of
     uncut quiet
contained in a single closed
                     memory-loop,
the polarities of our exchanging thoughts
switching through umbilical corridors;

knowledge of duramen, heartwood
alburnum, sapwood;
abscission of leaf-fall
the tidal flush through xylem bundles,
slow accretions of lignin;
to plant in synodic rhythm,
                  sidereal frequency
where grubbing roots knot spread matrices of
     blood,
                 bone & gristle
ourselves & all we touched
grown from the one mesoderm,
     indivisible tissue;
an act to shake a single webstrand
                    vibrates the whole:
     a lock of hair severed,
     a tree felled,
     a letter sent

                  tiny instruments of causes deep in nature

this chalky knoll
“a multi-coloured fortified
     place”
flint-warted, gouged & rucked by
centuries of landslip
a hillful of trees thrust up;

writh & rowaty grass in
shades of buff, bistre,
     russet, rust & cinnamon
foxfire of deciduous larch &
out of the red the
     red dogwood a woodpigeon

                   heavily

     & in all our outdoor days together the
     one thing he never spoke of to me
     was love
                  nor I to him

where the antlers of an inverted stag
take root among
     ophidian coils
obscured by a sprung
                   thicket of words
we carved a private alphabet,
residual meanings from
remoter signals of beech & sycamore
     “woaks & ellems”;
now you have become your own myth, slipped
between cracks, into the void
                   the ginnung-gap
myself left sole librarian of the codex of
     the scapegoated
     the bypassed
     the dispossessed

pheasant economies
preserving the land yet
     refusing access;
                   social torpor
a parish adrift in its own dreaming
     swayed
by the stale exhalations of privilege, constructing
                   an ossuary of bird-bones

ash-rind exposing its
     geodic core, broken
gate tears at my sleeve;
scrying among the flyspecks &
                   amber rills
in the base of a cow trough for the
history of things to come

late oak eggar
knocks at my circle of light
set to die for what it craves,
that which is shielded from it,
denied it, would
                  kill it
     if it ever did succeed

caught a falling star &
    cut my hands to pieces
a “heroic girl”, an
unspilt vessel of silence
my years of backlogged speech
     grown calcareous like a
                          stone baby

weighting you down
deep & safe in the
     grave of my thought
now you are mine & only mine
no other footstep
     could form its impress in
the leaf-encumbered chambers of
                   my heart

in the chill beneath
the trees a mist becomes
     particulate, shines
my rough embarkened self
concealed as less than woman
                  more than human:
earth gripped, this
grief, impacted, is what I have
     that is my own &
what belongs to me I keep


                                      Marty South, ‘The Woodlanders’
                                      Bubb Down Hill