There is blood in my fingers, pink and wet, 

a fog condenses from westward sea: 

the breathy phantom of a slumbering leech.

And at the end of our road, the promise of

meat, whispered by horizons we cannot see, 

and on the road, the dogged hunger.  

​

My eyes are roving as to drink 

from out the rough green-purple plant, 

my fingers arcing as to grasp 

a pallid stem of pixy limb  

or widn scarf of bucca’s scale. 

​

That night there must have been a storm, strong 

enough to rouse the sea: 

dog-hair ropes cling damp to the blue 

of the hollowed thigh, the frothy tendons 

on granite spine, 

a crooked scorpion tail in swell  

anticipates the spit-white horse’s tail,  

the bandit grin on panting shore,  

Komodo tongue  

in salted teeth, 

the slime of an unsheathed mollusk

hand: the coastline bristles,  

the fields heave. 

He lays himself upon the soil, spent, 

unwelcome. 

​

To the left of us a piddling henge, 

already posted with a mouldy plaque, 

posted on the newest map, 

by satellites, logged and tracked 

in empty black beyond the world. 

​

Further left the mist enshrouds, 

out which trundles mottled cow, 

her calf still fawning for its womb, 

a pink-white muzzle on the red-brown

islet, the soft impression of a waning moon. 

​

The cow, the moon… the obscure Cornish goddess 

Bughiven in corporeal form, 

her calf leughefe in rust-mud rushes, 

by Arthur Gernow he was born 

like wind that laps the half-remembered sea,

to and from the vacant cove,  

beneath my wizened soles, imagined.