Two Poems

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Bears

The machines of man? As opposed to what,
the machines of bears? Watch out for redundancy.

They've been multiplying, you know,
blooming to enormous overcoats
in gloomy forest spaces.

Even the occasional panda or polar bear
joins them to hymn If you go
down to the woods today. But the trees
can't hold them forever: just yesterday
I found the milk and honey snuffled,
paw prints on the kitchen tiles, and under
the fridge the shadow buzzed with fur
or the memory of it. Soon enough
we will have to stop telling the kids
there's nothing in the closet.
Stay away from pits, especially
those roughly the size
of a bear's mouth. Stock up on traps,
perhaps a blunderbuss or two.
All this hardly needs saying.

Moving House

It's the way the candlebulbs gather
shadows at the top of the stairs,
black fabrics you put on like a coat
that's cold right through, a dead
relative’s. It's as if the house
sticks to you, shows you all
its spirits in one last
candid attempt:
                          the armchair's emptiness,
the bedroom door that cools at night
and opens itself, the image
of your face in a hundred surfaces.
 
The field-horses trickle over
the horizon. You have left
a part of yourself swimming in the trees
among swifts and sparrows that come
and go without end, with the rat
whose eyes flashed once in headlights
and vanished down the hole of your head –
which is now some other head you soon forget.

 JAMES MIDGLEY – Work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals in the U.K. and the U.S. – such as Aesthetica, Ampersand, Fuselit, Umbrella and Nth Position. He is gallery director for poetry of the website deviantART and editor of the poetry journal Mimesis (www.mimesispoetry.com)

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