Peter Makin

 

Neck of the Woods

I.

The twig knuckle being caught
lifts up a curl of clear water;
ancient of days.

A small pulse, irregular,
down this groove
arising from the play of water-flow
round the leaves and the brown cedar-spray
as they sway
caught under water.

After each pulse a strange slow dimple
across the pool.
Difference of temperature?

And then at last a movement up in the cleft
where the water also moves:
not the stream, but a living waterlouse.

 

II.

Mandibles, proboscis
the ant and the loplop bug

a small stand of mushrooms
along the groin of a meadow
under bamboo.

Ferns about to burst out of the ground;
mayfly dancing above the waterflow;
every event in this stream is an irregular wave.

III.

A huge wasted-out tree-stump
almost alevel with the ground
with the firm young upstanding fern-shoots
higher than it,
some bowed,
some curled up,
ready to rise. And now I've trud on one;
no longer ready to rise.

That wrinkle in the water
that stays,
that fold in the glassy substance
where the fold meets another fold
and is itself ribbed:

1. Silver drop
at about-one-second intervals
down a dark frond

2. Every third pulse, or so
the wave over the rock dwindles
and the ribs start to dry

3. The bird overhead, per-
petually
an unsatisfied scale of five notes.

Waves and wrinkles,
back-wrinkling across the pond,
meet and disperse.

 

IV.

In the vast cavernous hole
millions of work-hands
on ladders, with buckets,
rising and falling
in a centipede-like movement,
like the wind passing over fronds
or the flow of a centipede's legs
rising unendingly.

 

V.

St John's pulpit
now gone, now rotted:
an old sock, dimpled with orange
and bent over like a limp finger
beckoning.

In the stream, under a tomb of living lead
the little bug has implanted itself
very firmly in the side of the living rock.
The twig has stopped rocking,
somehow locked;
only the thickening water over it, in waves,
makes it seem to move.

A dollop of snow lands on the rock,
diverting the pulse;
the pulse melts it;
but for a while it was changed,
changing some other rhythm
downstream.

 

VI.

Wail, and cry from the unknown creature on my left
to the unknown creature on my right.

The open maw full of fungus.

Little gleam of sun on the lower part of a tree-trunk;
this was a meadow.

Tree rockets off to the left
to start a new life.

Here a deer lay.

Little fists of fern-ends,
grass growing out of a crack in an old stump.

And the bubble with the rhythm of a heartbeat
and the dangling hairs as if from a twat
with the beads of water on them
evermore thrown up by the stream.

 

VII.

The leaf-edge lifts
and lifts
on the water,
but not regularly;
the whole mass of them, leaves and cedar-fronds, shakes like a belly,
irregularly,
and on the upturned leaves
the globes of water wobble, but don't move.

 

 

Copyright © 2008, Peter Makin.

Peter Makin lives in Japan. Best known as a critic, and the author of some fine books on Pound and Bunting, his poetry has appeared several times in Shearsman.