Elisabeth Bletsoe
HERE HARE HERE
for Chris Torrance
the gates are open
& all the paths are clear
autumnal
pelage
hinging between say
September/October stress say grey hares white
forces a seam from the rabbits
temporomandibular to
the jumping muscle sub
orbital
intimations of seizure
lunacy old moon rising, a
lunalepsy blood filled
the flickering of little hares cuticle
aerial
pappae of bristly ox-tongue holding
the fading light
though the presence of darkness is proving
the universe while
infinite is neither eternal nor
unchanging don’t come to me with your tall tales wide
smile of intent, your hidden
agenda
o spoony eared one
the fidget-foot, the foldsitter
a fine tilth/tilt gobyground, mumbler of cabbages
of the earth windswift, side-looker
the stealaway, frisker in hedges
mazing a
mazed:
stubble grown long hic a’ter hock
shadows grain hicker to hacker
too poor for flour
this season
rendering
down to feather
& bone
“she ran her life away, her
blood gone all to froth” (such a rare cruel hunt)
flattened
stems of redshank; torn
integument a form
like the impress of a human knee
bulge of the eye so set so high
prominent jewel-cold
from behind we could see through through which the ordinary becomes
directly luminous
the aqueous humor
discharging focus
across the motor cortex
random
sightings
malum omen
diverting attention from is it
individual error &
carelessness of execution to be late on reaching your
destination, to be
kissing the hare’s foot
yet
the shape of your path was visible
from the very beginning
when all is done they say
a hare
is a hare is a hare
BIRDS OF THE SHERBORNE MISSAL XIII
Fesaunt, Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus)
A needle does not yet exist to drill these bone-ends for threading; this amulet in remembrance of the dead. Pain accepted as an explication of growth, slivers & thorns a means of securing paper-thin sections of secondary calligraphy, wetly unfolding. In leaves of hedge-maple. Flesh stutters & fails, allows ingress. Violets take root within a lattice of barbules, elegant self-assemblages of optical nanostructures. Light: as a feather. Remiges & rectrices. She waits by the blood in silence, welded to a complex geology, the inclusive hills. Dark Lane, Pink Knoll Hollow, Horse Scratch Field, everywhere a map for somewhere else, textually enriched by silts & marls, pleistocene clays. Pollarded, the countryside engineered to near riot; stirred for a bird, the lie of the land. Lawless laws. A socket, enucleate; splanchnic cavity plangent as the recess of an ancient rebec. Tersely set aside. The spurred feet of a fallen crusader, deo non fortuna. At the foot of the page, three kings pursue their journey through a delicate landscape occupied by a dog hunting a hare. Celandine pollen, caught in the creases of the herepath, the military road.
gules, a cross
argent & crosier in pale
or debruised
VOTIVES TO ST. WITE
“true anchoresses are called birds”
the fluttering heart
titmouse flurry beats against glass, tinsel
imprisoned under the claws fretting the leadlight
upturned boat of the nave
though the door to the sun/Son
stands open
the winged tower
grows budding heads with ex-
ophthalmic eyes talons & herpetic skin
vitreous where are the angels?
shadows
“sealed in
yet soaring”
petitions/
petrous/
piteous
heal mi blodi sawle
from me did the all come forth and
unto me did the all extend
the submerged forest flows
back to its source, lias
& blue clay fanning out clay veins (in the back of my hand)
bearing twigs, branches, birchbark & many hazelnuts
“all laying anyhow” exhumed by woodmice
blackened stump
with adherent leaves/leaf impressions washed out
elephant bones;
a bowl carved from the alder’s
oracular limb, a wooden bowl &
antlers in the peat
I am wedded to these woods
this water
the
wind’s panthalassic echo surging
forms the matrix of & rolling
my dreams
brands my unforgiving skin my body
is becoming this dirt & fish-scale under my nails
my assigned place
billet socket groove
tuck garth pen
fold close enclosure
anchorhold holdfast
as barley moon woneth ant waxeth ne
shifts towards blood moon nis neaver stude-vest
is becoming this my order of service
uht-song bi niht i winter
i sumer the dahunge
translating observing
the skywriting of thunderflies dance
fieldfares a fading epitaph
impressing
my palms with yew bark’s red
fracture
split a piece of wood and I am there
lift up the stone and you will find me
only in silence the word
this word seggeth
“the structural dome of the Vale strictly
an elongated oval pericline (like an upturned boat)”
& I at the centre of
a cratch-cradle
of springlines bridlepaths holloways
patterns of drainage & incision
gederith in ower heorte alle seke
ant sarie
speaking a mass over these worts
that wa ant poverte tholieth
for stone & stranguary, for
soldering the sinew cut coction/decoction
in sunder
vulnerary electua
distilled water drunk of powdered root a drachm
with juice & oil of Roses by
antipathy to Mars
for scabs and tetters
foul smelling sores
in a hollow tooth a wineglass
with honey to digest the phlegm removeth
from the eye the pin & web
for hardness & stoppings against
the passions of the heart
lingua cervina
moist & uncoiling in wet meadows
hoary with down, the
salve of hire wunden
there is light within a woman of light &
she lights up the whole world; if she
does not shine she is darkness
walking the surf-path in
repeated patternings along the winter beach storm pilings:
the grating of shingle the
upturned hull of a boat
a rosary of pebbles
receiving under the radar those
ghosted signals from shipping long
confounded succumbed to the
hypnotic pull of colder reaches
“the whale road”
continued scourings reveal
pyritised gleamings a broken phragmacone
landslip topography
following
the slumped narrative of the cliffs
stopped along
the highest point of
this the southern coast wind bent
in on itself in the
shape of a thorn
do you want to hear how it feels?
a noise in the eye
song of the grass rattle
of sea-pinks’ dried calices
ther foryeoteth al the world, ther
beoth al ut of bodi
ther i sperclinde luve my thoughts & prayers
up towart heovene
“cloud-piercing”
from knots of conscience
smoothing the heart
because thou hast drunk,
thou hast become drunk from the bubbling spring
which I have measured and tended
how close life’s surface imprisoned in my
how tough the membrane that own time by
traps me beneath the story of my fate
the cul of the axe
blinded by vision those
who pilgrimage
are not aware of their journey
only the passage of time
naket of haliness ant gasteliche wrecche
their low vehement jarrings
fanatical griefs, intransigent
as children leavings
of peg-dollies & troll-beads
forests of wax
anachorein
to go apart
under my tongue the
egg will hatch &
my mouth will give birth the fluttering heart
birthing my own soul
where are the angels? the timeline
is becoming a helix
HIC . REQESCT . RELIQUE . SCE. WITE
the thigh-bones of
a small woman about
forty &
a scattering of teeth
those are periwinkles that were my eyes
fleoth wel the habben lutel flesch:
I am a bird-girl now
ant feole fitheren
Whitchurch Canonicorum,
Dorset, October 2009
Copyright © Elisabeth Bletsoe 2016
Elisabeth Bletsoe is the curator of Sherborne Museum in her native Dorset. Her publications include Landscape from a Dream (Shearsman 2008) and Pharmacopoeia & Early Selected Works (Shearsman 2010). She has recently written the biography of a previously unresearched botanical artist, Diana Ruth Wilson, and is currently involved with the artist Frances Hatch, providing textual responses to her collages in the exhibition/publication Drawn to Antarctica. She has also collaborated with the Cambridge composer Kim B. Ashton, who has put several poems from Pharmacopoeia to musical settings.