The Details
Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus,
singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.
Somehow they are lost.
He consults his map while the wife unscrews
her Thermos, pours a cup of tea.
He takes it without looking up.
They are in ‘50s light’: a green tint to the sky
and wearing large shorts.
At the edge of the forest,
silver birches shed strips of parchment,
ziggèd leaves shivering on warty twigs catch his eye,
tiny buds he squeezes till his nails whiten.
He tastes the oil upon his tongue:
α-copaene , germacrene , δ-cadinene .
A scrittle of feathery legs and impossibly
beady eyes hold him in black suspicion:
Scolytus ratzeburgi, privately building its own map,
a circuit-board metropolis below bark.
Claws rattle along to the tips. Little biter!
Fire starter!
Click.
Watch the hieroglyphics smoulder.
Moths with flickering antennae rise like ash.
The map must be wrong. So many trees!
He tears at the bark, consults the Scarabaean
engravings, the ancient pathways.
Foxes gallop past, pulling clouds drawn
through flanges of the waning moon.
Under this dog-yellow sky, tumbling and boiling,
driven by the ratio of little teeth to vulpine speed,
he falters, trying to remember, trying to picture
something that may have been important.
The last hounds flop behind him, heaving
and panting.
He spends thirty years eyeballing the beetle
while the wife is quietly absorbed in cables of ivy,
in Trentepohlia powdering the nearby beech,
black scraps of nostoc, all that remain of her bones.
Neither dares move in the knowledge their world
has vanished.
Jane Lovell lives in Rugby, Warwickshire. Her poems, which have been published in a range of journals including Agenda, Poetry Wales and Myslexia, focus on our relationship with nature, from a flea wearing tiny jewelled boots created by a Russian miniaturist to a circus elephant butchered during food shortages in post-war Vienna. Threads of folklore and science run through her work.