Oil

Slow shock of a near miss.
The car slides, the lane is lost
under icy rain. Wheels on a slick
of chestnuts and leaves

jump back onto a solid track.
I prickle with fear past the long
slow slopes where weeks before
the city people’s barbecues

had scattered between the trees.
I remember summer evenings,
the seat belt rubbing sunburn,
plans and fears about moving

to another town, looking for work.
Standing in a whitewashed room
I practised another language—
new words made my throat ache.

*

When the evening air is warm the banks
are bright with glow worms. They waste
their time trembling towards electric lights—
the passing cars and bedside lamps.

Only when people sleep can they find
their mates. As the season ends
the worms are washed by freezing rain.
The people are locked inside their homes

frightened of drinking water worried
about the food in their freezers
they watch televisions behind the curtains.
Security lights steam into darkness.

*

The engine’s heat leaves a trail of mist
that settles on broken twigs, crushed
seeds, mud tipping off grey banks.
There’s a plant in those woods

that in spring shows its tufty head
and when chopped from soft earth
the root shakes like a hairy man
and when sliced the knife squeaks

on its rubbery brown flesh.
The fried insides make everyone
dream of their golden age—
childhood summers of food and fire.

*

Yew trees sop up the car’s weak
light as the flooded road pours free
of the forest—past metal barns that
in summer steam the swallows’ eggs.

Farmhouses like peat brown
paperweights squeeze coal black
liquid from the fields. When spring
sun warms the earth’s oil the moorland

turns a darker brown and tar pits form.
We spent our school holidays camped
beside the tar watching the perfectly
preserved sabre toothed tigers

and mammoth backs rising to burn
under the painful sun. Those sticky
afternoons went so slowly yet the
summer was soon over.

On the limestone rocks above the tar
are pools so clear that rowing boats
seem to float on air. Our dirty hands
would send oil swirling across

reflections of white clouds, white birch.
Winter’s cold holds down the mammoths,
the tigers wait for spring. Mineral pools
fill with dead leaves and are frozen.

*

Headlights fill with water, spinning
with rust like snowstorm ornaments.
Broken tiles pile around houses
like the houses abandoned when

a reservoir takes a year to fill.
As the water rises the people mark
the change in their lives by tying
flags to pines. In the freezing water

a team of trainee divers sweep
torchlight across a muddy church—
the bubble eyes of a catfish are
headlights in the porch. Swollen

trees become sea monsters.
From under broken tiles crayfish
extend green eyes. There are eels
flowing beyond the car’s glass.

The trees are switched off by cold.
The headlights are a warm world
of rust shrimps, silver eels—
my sight is held within waterlogged

light falling on leaves turning dirt soft,
almost dreaming, tiredness pulling my
flesh tight, my head filling with sounds
of tiles crunching under tyres.

*

Farmers watch weather reports,
check web sites, receive e-mails
about the price of seeds. Children
are at the windows like cave fish

washed from under the hills
their golden eyes watch the pages
of roof slates cracking open
and sheets of oil in gutters.

The car is covered in a skin
of rain, it feels its way through
closing roads, throws aside
layers of mud and slate.

*

Swallows buried in mud beside
streams and fields wait for clouds
to clear to shake themselves clean
and return to the barns.

People locked inside houses
dream about summer, stare into
screens. The country’s cold centre
is going mad with lack of light.

My mind starts closing down to one
primeval twist of tiredness, the daily
twitch that keeps the swallows
alive in their mud sacks.

When swallows are lifted from the mud
gold sometimes comes up with them—
they are attracted to cracked coin pots
and Roman rose bowls.

Fortunes are made following swallows
before the winter madness starts
and darkness fills the heads
of people locked inside their homes.

*

I remember a summer’s evening sinking
down into marshes and a chalk slope
dried by wind off the flatlands.
A circle of grass cut from scrub

held up at its centre a whitewashed house.
The three storey block was the same shape
as the swimming pool that, like a bright
shadow, extended from it. Pool reflections

showed the house buried in the lawn.
I wanted to live there. When the owners
went to work I swam in the water.
The tower was a sundial, distant trees

told the time by its shadow. One day
I will build a house like that, swim through
windows reflecting clouds to the door,
dry myself on the steps, open the door.

*

When shadows fall closer to the house
and summer strengthens pale stems,
fields and woods form a shallow dish
of life, a breeding bowl where warm eggs

open and every moving thing is food.
Winter’s darkness thins my blood,
rain on the car condenses my breath.
I wipe the glass and see farmhouses,

a face at a computer, steam rising
from a security light, shadows across
curtains, a child dancing in the light
from a wide screen television.

*

As the car climbs back into tree tunnels
the headlights open a small hole
in darkness. The engine’s heat settles
on slabs of bark, an acorn mash

leading further into the dark centre
of a country going under water.
Dark mornings and early evenings
must almost meet before winter’s

shadow begins to slowly clear.
Warming floods defrost the eggs
of insects and the hearts of singing
birds pump faster. Rain on the window

throws spring light into the room.
I watch swallows shaking themselves
clean on telegraph cables, testing their
new feathers against the sun.