Stroke
Forgetful, in a stroke of genius,
you set the dictionary on a shelf in the fridge
where it lay all night in dark wordlessness:
rosetta of crystal, coomb of roots,
the house of language cooling like a hive.
What were you thinking but this new winter?
Participles glinting, nouns to glass, I took it out:
an old terrain under ice, sub-zero of the word
where you traced clawed prints on a page,
found sound snugged and dumb in earth,
a world reformed in silence.
tap it now with a tuning fork, put it to your ear
like the sun’s spring choir; say Corby, Eden,
Gelt Wood, place where spinneys raise letters
of boles, ice shucked as a crow lifts into blue,
and your lost tongue comes to a litany of fields,
landscape of boundary and dyke, the mud lanes
returning in a shine of names and signs,
a http://ugateamunited.com/online/ familiar river rising on the grammar of rain.
What might it be but the start of thaw?
Sit with me here, word hoard between us;
sense meltings, warmed breath on air, the whisper
of sibillants turned clear and hasped on the branch;
note hedges and furrows in rime: and there –
do you see it? Watch it go,
a fluent rabbit in a field of snow.
Terry Jones‘ poems have appeared in a range of magazines, including The New Statesman, Poetry Review, Agenda, Ambit, Magma, Iota, Envoi, The London Magazine, New Welsh Review, Wasifiri and others. In 2011 he took 1st prize in the Bridport poetry competition. Poetry Salzburg published his first short collection, Furious Resonance in 2011.