With Merlin, Morgana danced on dewy ground
where the wild oats abound. Now, enchantment
is ossified in the bones, hid in neither cave
nor crystal tower nor burning tree,
but in next-door’s shed. All stored away:
the pipe that keened and the trumpets blown
where the wild lilies and the shadows grow.
Merlin is all dressed in garden twine,
brushed with creosote, and in sackcloth, draped
as stiff as nails and lumpy as old paint.
Under his tin-roof, he half-remembers a song
that’s not measured in twos or fours or threes.
Merlin wishes he could sleep forever
but the highway comes slithering and serpentine:
the A38 creeping like a dragon down the hill.
Beside it, someone raises power lines
and along it roll Woolworths and motor cars,
futures come, ruin it all, and futures pass.
As Merlin rises, the woodwork bench creaks
like the hinge on a crypt door.
His screws and bolts and tacks are spilled,
where old ghost-voices used to burr
their taxonomy of threads, of tongue,
and groove. They buzz their zees in mitre,
in dovetail, and mortise in the wood.
They say, come fiddle under elm, come sing
under the oak, come beat the man-skin drum.
But his work in the shed is never done:
he takes whitener to green grass-stains,
where crimson corpse-eyed poppies dream,
and unwinds the clock so it’s summer again.
In the oily slipstream of Ermin Way,
he rubs linseed into the scented willow’s grain.
As the juggernauts roar and smoke,
he stows a split-cane carp-rod in its bag
and wonders if it’s the year for fibreglass.
In dim memory, an old measure shines,
that’s not quite right: not sevens or fives.
He shakes a leg and the dog-rose howls
in scarlet riot, but he’s gone all out of time.
Oliver Smith
Oliver Smith is a visual artist and writer from Cheltenham, UK. He is inspired by Tristan Tzara, J. G. Ballard, and Max Ernst; by the poetry of chance encounters, by frenzied rocks towering above the silent swamp; by unlikely collisions between place and myth and memory. His poetry has been published in ‘Abyss & Apex’, ‘Ink, Sweat, and Tears’, ‘Strange Horizons’ and ‘Sylvia Magazine’ and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He holds a PhD in Literary and Critical Studies from the University of Gloucestershire. For more information see his website: https://oliversimonsmithwriter.wordpress.com/
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