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Sport 4: Autumn 1990

3

3

German wasps are quartering the riverbed
killing everything that moves,
This morning the hot smell of Friesians in the drizzle,
a dazzle of pink & white candy-coloured foxgloves.
Every time they speak they need to hurt somebody.
Sometimes when she looks at him it makes him cringe.
German wasps are quartering the riverbed:
each one hovers like a tiger-striped syringe.

It's not their fault, but it may as well be
for all the decades it sets them back.
The little screech owl sings intermittently
all night: the tension keeps them awake.
Yesterday the rusty orange water looked innocuous
trickling through the floor of the cave.
Meanwhile the poison was sleeping in the brain.
Soon they will have wiped out that layer of the foodchain.

*

Holed up in the safety of a clean motel
they plug into the TV to shut out the melancholy.
Shortly the night frogs start up their chainsaws.
The football from Australia excites his body.
He thinks about the rustle once of someone's
parka, wiping a mosquito off her cheek with a sleeve.
Likewise the sassy alligator wrestler
has pursued the stolen child into the underworld.

page 6

They know that when they kiss they mean precisely what they say,
although their bodies never let on what they talk about.
They know that in the morning they will wake up
to find that they have moved on & left themselves behind
in their sleep. Perhaps they will be frozen into postures
of hostility, their bodies knowing too much for their own good.
Happily for now she is too canny to speak, though
she can feel a voice from somewhere trying to butt out.