Seas are where you recognize
the pirates, or the flock or school
whose harsh yet neighbourly cries
lash a comfortable ridicule,

fins ploughing clay, turning the worm,
gulls nimble as English men o' war,
a buoy bolt-upright in the storm,
which then turns out to be more

like a weathercock, then indeed
a weathercock, on a drowned spire
undaunted by a white horse stampede,
or loss of the uplifting choir

damned by raiding pagan gospels.
Only oceans have cathedrals.

***

Woods are what vandals left behind
when they carried off the history prize.
They float like pondweed on the mind.
Their leaves are the republic's lies,

and grandma's hairnet, smiling gold,
all weathers' topsail, crow's-nest of straw.
She keeps the girls from growing old,
which keeps the boys from wanting more.

Virtue is cheeky, villainy po-faced,
luxury a mask, poverty a root.
The dry log's lettering in a rustic taste
charts sea-lanes blossoming with loot.

Forests are the limbo of the hatless drowned,
failed baptism, the stonefish wound.

copyright © Robert Saxton, 2005.

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Robert Saxton makes his second Shearsman appearance in this issue. He was born in Nottingham in 1952, and now lives in north London, where he is the editorial director of an illustrated-book publishing company. He has published two collections: The Promise Clinic (Enitharmon Press, London, 1994) and Manganese (Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2003).