SOLSTITIAL

We are drawn by a map of sweet ash winding
through the twilit streets. There should be three fires:
one of clean bones, one wood, one both.

We have only split logs and white wax to offer
and a tithe of furred moths, and a swan’s egg washed
to the shore in a flood, two days earlier.

We pass the sloshing oval from palm
to palm, cold as stone, full
of things that will not happen. We float

wreaths from the candle-lit jetty to the dark
fretful heart of deepest water;
bunches of fox gloves and elder flower;

give ourselves to the lake to slake
the calamitous storms of the future; muttering
moonshine, mid-mid, most inclined,

axial tilt. We drink. We burn
the sickly half-year, leap the flames
solemn, hallooing. Our voices spin

round the dish of the vale, which is also a crater,
which is also a wheel. We want to sing
through the centre but the night is too light here, cloud

confusing the jagged horizon. We try
to feel it. 23.09. Maximum
cant. The exactness anachronistic.

Mid-mid most-inclined we chant
like a hymn or something older.
We will wash our faces with cold grey dew.

We will sleep with flowers pressed under our pillows.
We will run the streets naked at three in the morning,
the sun almost starting to rise.

WAKING THE WELL

It spills itself on tarmac, dressed
00000000000000000000000in weeds. Thinks itself forgotten.
Disproven hydropathic quack.
00000000000000000000000A cross on an antique map. Archived.
Machinery broken up in museums.

It belongs to May. Sugar-water
00000000000000000000000sundays crazed with growth, stone
blessed till it ruptured colour, sweet
00000000000000000000000spring ringing out with the bluebell scent
of long light health, cool wonder.

Before the last I will kneel on the damp
00000000000000000000000grass at its feet, bare-legged, hands
open on knees, palms up – blank
00000000000000000000000mirrors to a surge of sky – drink
in silence. Lick open its liquorice eyes.

Rise.   Walk on into the lake.
00000000000000000000000Trust the water to matter.

ONGIARA

for JS and MH

They will try to tell you it means ‘thunder of waters’,
Onghiaahra – ‘the strait’ – a channel
or inlet, life on a watershed, critical
junction. Or maybe a line through the neck,
where the neck is a strip of land, split
into two, bisected. Or two distinct bodies
of land converging, not held apart
by their difference but rather, touching, always
touching water touching water
which bonds them together – where water is both
the pledge and the act of pledging, wedded
by its state of being, a troth.

We have gathered here, drawn together
in this place of water, where water finds
a way – gives the lie to notions of nation,
of borders – parts and re-meets where it will.
The source of so much power. A shower
of ringlets in a woman’s hair. A veil.
The limit and the fractured light where selves meet.
We’ve watched you year on year, cascading
into each other, melting shoulder
to shoulder, forehead to forehead, inclining
closer, arms interlocked or reaching
to a touch as certain as falling.

This day has been coming since the glaciers receded.
Before that, an ancient sea here drifted
to its own tidal order. Four million square
feet of sweet green water tumbles
over the crest line every minute.
Water to water, meeting over
a gap that is shrinking with each drop’s effort.
In 50, 000 years it will have
worked the distance away completely –
there will be no fall, just water moving
through water. Impossible then to tell
one stream, one drop from another.

GOLDEN

They say you bring rain, a change in pressure.
The barometer clicked by the window – gold-rimmed
eye – as you entered the frame. Wolf-killer

you brought us out, into the open, into
the green and bruise-grey garden, into
the warm and metal scent of summer

from a dream or idea, and left. Then thunder,
the first full drops of water, viscous
with essence of jasmine and yellow azalea,

the kind which poisons honey. One
wet black bee in a flower umbrella
told how you came from above – eyes

suns – their orbits’ static – lightening.
And yes, the clap of your wings became
the crack of the sky splitting open, but

after the flood the clouds lit up
with a vein of gold. Later, it seemed
everything stopped as you strutted across

the emptied pasture, weathered and foxed –
as you turned and stared – as you creaked like a branch
in a high bare tree, and took off.

Polly Atkin’s second poetry pamphlet Shadow Dispatches (Bridgend: Seren, 2013) won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize, 2012, and was shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year, 2014. In June 2014 she was awarded New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize, for work in progress which ‘reflects a strong sense of place or the natural environment’. Her poem ‘A short history of the moon’ won the 2014 Wigtown Poetry Prize. She lectures in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow). She is currently completing her first full collection of poetry, and a monograph exploring the connections between Romantic legacies, contemporary creativity, ecopoetics, tourism and place. ‘Solstitial’ was written for an anthology of poems, Solstice: 24 Hours of Poetry from the Longest Day (Thurnam: Beautiful Dragons Press, 2012), in which 24 poets each wrote in and of an hour during that longest day. Polly chose to write about the hour between 11pm and midnight. 

BRAKE LIGHTS
by Holly Corfield-Carr 

OOOOoOOOOAs she takes the corner into Cannock Chase,
she sees a red moon wobbling over conifer,
OOOOOOOOOnervous retinal scan of the night’s blind eye
turning against the wood as she turns here,

OOOOOoopropels through high beam like a comet reversed
and lancing the dark, like the moth’s green meteor
OOooover the windscreen, like the neon tubing of deer eyes
at the roadside, the fast pelt into fern as she passes,

OOOOOsitting in her own pocket, continually turning itself
inside out onto tarmac in a trail of oil and hot air,
OOOOOstill cut with all her mis-sung lines and fart and half
of all her uplit conversations.

OOOOoOOShe bowls downhill. The red tops of the conifers
wince shut the bloodshot moon and the whole
OOOOOoOOOOObrutal fuss of the forest is gone. She sings
her heart out. Closes her eyes. Drives.

OOOOOOOOooOAhead and from behind the dark tarpaulin,
the deer toes the edge of the road, bright strip
OOOOOooOof heat, stands to shake the night from her back,
listening to the overlapping lunacy of the birds

OOOOOoooowhen the light skewers her. And she holds her
face in the half cup of her hands on the wheel,
OOOooOOOthe brace of her reflection over her animal face,
a sudden, illegible selenelion —

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooOwhich is two bodies reminding
OOOOOOOOOOOOOeach other they are bodies
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooOOin time

PROPITHECUS CANDIDUS, 1871

by Polly Atkin

When your spirit returns its shape is revealed
by a fuzzed white halo – iron filings
in negative – tracing your moving field
through the trees. Your face is concealed, only
your eyes and voice blare out. Night
gloves your fingers, muffles the putt
of your landing, soft, outside their door.
Sleeping, they are not frightened of you.
They do not know you, or what you will mean.
Your seven songs.
OOOOOOOOYour hushed leap.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYour ancestors’ journey.
You have none of the cunning of my species, silken
demon. You never learn to attack
or run. You watch through lenses of dim
fire like the embers of forests, mark
your place and are gone. As quick as a continent
shuffles north, as an ocean gyre
shifts to reverse.
0000000000From an unknown height
you howl the lament of the restless dead.
Your strange trajectory.
OOOOOOOYour sweepstake hypothesis.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYour solitary territory.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYour dynamo hum.

Holly Corfield Carr is based in Bristol and Cambridge where she is working on a PhD in site-specific writing. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Frieze Writer’s Prize in 2015. Her pamphlet MINE, documenting a series of performances in an eighteenth-century crystal grotto, was published by Spike Island in 2014.

Polly Atkin’s second poetry pamphlet Shadow Dispatches (Bridgend: Seren, 2013) won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize, 2012, and was shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year, 2014. In June 2014 she was awarded New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize, for work in progress which ‘reflects a strong sense of place or the natural environment’. Her poem ‘A short history of the moon’ won the 2014 Wigtown Poetry Prize. She lectures in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow). She is currently completing her first full collection of poetry, and a monograph exploring the connections between Romantic legacies, contemporary creativity, ecopoetics, tourism and place.