Shearsman 51 Mike Parker Two Poems Elizabethan Gentlemen on The Thames 1599 A wallet of night, a thin skiff, both, wait on the water; your lyre lays in the gunwhale and the cliff of darkness in this past holds its hung, wave-shape fast against your hurried rower's hire... (The day's drunk details kept the sky away, and meats in many reds were either vital or denied: the dead eaten, the caught bear and mastiff fought until the living and dying, bled.) .... When lightning sears a caesar scar along the river's live tissue, twelve thousand lanterns die, their stars lost in the greater flash. They are water and ash, the gentlemen, glowing wishes. The river knows they're dead people as they live, so they feast and song as they tipple under steeples; yet Awe is their moral, and the chopped water calls to come, to be gone, to float along. Brine and Fresh, mix their salt and clear tingle, at the tide's pushing point; the sky's hands on your shoulders steer you to bank, land and Inn, to beer and table; shin beef's juices, red-wet in the joint, painted in whorls like a cosmos, printed by a god's finger, ringed with weep loops, a cut trunk across, next to pickles and conserves. Every song preserves them in the rhythm of a hymn. Sing today's meaning, gentlemen, on water cheat oblivion.   Coracle Come from a roundhouse, sat in the belly boat, an ancient Briton angles between worlds; the coracle turns slow – the iris of a circled lake with the long view of a planet's eye; it doesn't cut or cleave like a kayak   – It's where it wants to be – Why does the water suggest an endless smouldering fire and the fish, helix like offspring, in unpredictable twists of rhythm? Into this, conquest came straight as a Roman road. Tramped with a route, parallelogram shields, cloaks tucked tight by battle brooches. Empires sew evil into strict insignia. Power fears a curve    martial hate and potency draw lines                of communication                            of combat conquest demands angles and the mathematics of the march; file, rank and shoulders squared with a retinue of intellects, graphing a geometry of oppression: Emperors don't employ anglers. The coracle floats without displacement; a sign on liquid parchment, the water soft as the lop of his hunting dog's jaw, rolls wet palms over the cheek of the boat. He'll strike his spear into the pool's tenderness, even for him, success is a disturbance but he'll become part of the healing quietness after. Past him stride the ruthless, in transit to every regime's dissolution.     copyright © Mike Parker, 2002 Mike Parker lives in Brighton with his wife and three children. His poems have appeared in a number of UK magazines.