DAVID ROSS LINKLATER
David Ross Linklater is a poet form Easter Ross. He is the author of
three pamphlets, most recently Scenes from a God Movie (Speculative
Books, 2021). He lives and writes in Glasgow (Scotland).
Twitter @DavidRossLinka / www.davidlinklaterpoetry.com
Embodied Dialogues
1
Dust, the window must be a sore lung.
There's an animal here that doesn't sleep
and neither can the crows perched on the infirmary,
on these roads of bad arteries, unhappiness
and moss. Wind milks washing lines.
Same faces, each morning the green man, red man,
auburn steel. What drives you to routine is fear
of no movement, fear of losing your hair without saying
there are lollipop ladies, milkmen, dying breeds.
Night appears with a mouth of black cloth.
What if it had gums, though? Wouldn't that be a terror?
Fall in a heap of down, palpitations, appointments.
Pipes blackened with a man suffering his lowest ebb,
a far gone silhouette, a hand of sand, a balding dog.
There's no leveller like nothing and that's feeling close.
Happy accidents, anyone being upright long enough
to lay on their side, find a new home in strata, ringside seats
on the dark star. Embodied dialogues, ants carrying away rice
to the real spirit world. Barcoded dogma, sadness is a black cat
facing the wall of yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Scunnered, the deep adaptation underway. If only
the smallest ends fired us the way the big ones do.
In a terra firma of daisies, bins all rotten to shit, not realising
how peaceful the garden was until the table was under tarpaulin,
old thoughts find new agencies. Walls skinned of scales.
What structure underneath. Standing in line for death's autograph,
rubbing shoulders with other cratered beings, sockets
blurred with dust, and all of them saying huge things,
chanting in unison up and down corridors of old kingdoms.
Ah, dreams are for the hopeless romantic, and we were once, hopeless.
There were months when everything was rotten, years joined
together, rust on a bike chain. But wow, didn't it fly?
Didn't it cause a wee bird to flutter?
To know a pair of old boots, the woman
with the love in her hair, a voice sewn down in the grain.
To consider the water trough, how it was burst years
and never flooded the field. How it always flows
back to Balmuchy. There must be a God there
at the tatties, down in the ceremonies of dirt.
Bet he'd dazzle the villagers with a bag of fishbones,
spinning a mad cane, throwing his roots about.
On the hilltops people are dancing. Along motorways
traffic is going nowhere. Child on a swing,
what a soft wind keeps you afloat.
You and your fear of tractors keeps us real.
Back to Front.