Dreaming teacher
In the hollow of the night you leap
from your bed and slip through the patio
doors into your garden. Slim legged
and shyly bowed head, you graze –
not the woman sleek in black
who teeters through your working day
but a deer with fawn speckled flanks
and trim feet, ballerina light, across
the silvered lawn. Stars
scatter like cigarette sparks
and you breathe the night air, raising
your flared nose to the sky
until a shadow wakes from the twisted
boughs of trees, pours his breath
and shakes his mane, unflinching light,
between the walls, across the lawn,
leaving prints which mimic the shape
of flowers as he bounds towards you –
just catching your shoulder
with a fine pencil line of red.
RCJ Allan writes poetry in the spaces she finds between teaching and other entanglements. She is a Northerner who has wandered South; her work has been published in Other Poetry, Obsessed with Pipework, Orbis and Pennine Platform.