C S Hughes

Higher Ground

During the floods

We imagined higher ground

How it wassailed us with promised grandeur

The way wandering philosophers proffer

Stark and mountainous vagaries

That none can ever reach

Except Tensing and Hillary

And the small fawn sparrow

They startled on the crest

When the waters failed to recede

We thought of broader bridges

Crossing vast, immodest swathes

To new and celebratory shores

Isolated but still standing

A wary freeway pass

Animals stymied in their crossing

Despite the crocodile trawl

Of ripples veering from unknown objects

The rent teeth gnawing

An opaque surface

Muck and slick and indolent

As if this ark were of a sudden

A peaceable place

Like in the idylls of latter day saints

Lambs and lions in repose

Trees garlanded with garbage wreaths

All those broken toys

Subarus, consoles, drowned kites fluttering

Fish in sublimation

Half caught in the turbulence of unexpected freedom

Dead blank star smashed screens

Mired in neon vacancies and silt

Offered up to the entrails of monsters

From which they were once made

Red as dawn’s blear warning

In hope

Of water’s gone

Transparent as the newly swollen day

A Poem Not Writ Whilst Dreaming

This is not the poem I wrote while sleeping

Where you wore a mask of summer’s wind bent trees

Of indecision crookèd on your face

Mouthing words no-one hears or reads

A dew from the parasol of your lips

As if the season were uncertain

The sky quite sunless (neither low nor high)

Irregardless of my hand by hand ascension

A lady’s plaits are worn rope

Anchored, twined

Lashed about

Through the day’s fraught folly

All departed ships of laughter

Behind the mollusc of your hand

Far from eider seas

Pillars deliberately leaning

The skull white dome caved in

Never once and never to return

Unwind thread by thread

See how they arc and sleek

As a storm field’s horses

Oil to calm and myrrh to laud

Fine scissors with those scaled

Bird-limbed handles

The stalk beak wading

Through frayed ends

Turning with an alchemist’s consideration

A gull lorn, restless cry

Flax to falling silver

MacBeth & Augelemono

You made pyjama soup
Lemon, eggs, basmati
In a witchy broil
Sleeve dipped thrice for auguries
The way Macbeth’s crones crowed
A particularly unpleasant hunger
Soft as eyes, and sour sweet
In transit
A spot of black
Against, slick-bright
An unknown planet
A veined eye still watching
Toast mostly blacked and cut
In strips thin as a walking forest
Smeared on your lips
The glistered, noisome mask
Of any revenger’s tragedy
The battle almost done
Just dregs and crumbs
Of midnight’s salt & pepper folly

When I Was A Dog

Hungering
For the reassurance of your face
Jaw thrust forward, a monstering
Marionetted palsy
Of strings and pinions
Inexpertly manipulated
I met you once
In another world
Ate a stale biscuit
Threw it up again
The sky in soot and butter
Curlicues and approbations
When I was a dog, for a while
Glass house, all lies, no windows
Barked at the moon
At her silver mockery 
Barked again, in the dark 
When she was gone
Stars like tears 
The poet said
But I was just a dog
Alone and
Not done howling

Bacon & Eggs (A revenger’s opera)

I broke two eggs

In that soft, one handed crush

You taught, a thumbnail for a spur

Hooked with the slight compression

That misshapes a world

Put them back together

Admittedly in somewhat different shape

All transparency gone

To a gleam made obtuse

As slippy, opaque destiny

Butchered to order

The sign read

(Hand drawn with

a crabbed and aching wrist)

On the corner of Argyle & Ross

The facade poisonous in dermatitis flakes

The dirty lead-white, scabrous underneath

Burst blisters watching, mouthing

How they hunger, how they weep

Cleaver raised, and falling like a curtain

A sizzle

As if the sea insisted

Something missing

When you turned off

The waxy flame

A dead thickness

In the nose, on the tongue

An old world

Of stones and moss

Where the fat, not quite rendered

Wears a misbegotten smile

I thought of you

There is
As much light
In a glass of rain


As the work
Of flowers’ basking faces


The strayed mischance 
Slanting by
The boards’ sopranino-clef


I thought of you
Left the glass
Drained to the pale silt
Of passing Sunday afternoons
On the ledge
Almost unseen
The way a drop
On a broad green leaf
Swole to a cyst


Pours away


A swan passing
With that complex
Treble-clef insistence
Of her bent-necked attention


Veils and shrouds
Are almost the same
In the way they hide your mouth


Broke from reverie
With the kind of equine start
That warily insists
Hand inadvertently flickering
Against unseen adumbrations 


That slight, eroded horizon


Fell to winter’s shards
The blood drops leaching 
From lax fingers, raised to lips


The warm, silent taste


Too bright to dismay
Another shallow sunrise

Dead Wallaby Sunrise

While you

relentlessly shop

To sate your triskelion god

With small household accoutrements

Paring knives, cup hooks, sealing wax

I go out at night

Howled when black dog ate

The yellow biscuit moon

Swole the colour

Of fog blown traffic lights

Threw it up again

Poisoned tongue and aquamarine

Ruby where the tyres

Flayed the skin

Drove on hard to the point

Where all white lines disappear

In oblivion’s sunrise

I will myself to sing (sub voce)

My brute euphonies

Eagle, crow hop, hung on a string

The day spills out entrails

Almost, (not quite)

Hungry again

Death & Camellias

The fence buckles

By a camellia’s weight

A cloying honeysuckle breath

Calls wilted petals falling

As if long drought surceased

In a tea cup’s avalanche

Jawbones prow the earth

A grimace clowned and sidelong

As if this were once a circus tent

Not a marshalling yard

Where brays anxious met

The impelling silence

Of hammers and serrations

When the earth uproots

In trenchant cascades

The ivy hideous, shivering

A wave, bent on the fulcrum’s back

In upheaval’s raw display

I wonder what pretty monsters

From desiccate honeycombs

In husk pale efflorations

From the secret earth, arise

The six techniques of highly ineffective mouse traps

New day has a fabric rip
The pyrethrum scent of last night’s neglected pans
Basmati and burnt metal
Slept with the sun inside
Woke weakly flailing
In your bite, a hard, machinic smile
A ridge against my wrist like sunrise
Broke a mouse’s neck
A small, uncoiled scream
Dragged up the hinge
The bared teeth, gladiatorial in glory
The tongue an ugly twist
Imagining a thousand crucifixions 
Along the Appian way
These brief lives another paltry annoyance
Marking the dwindling distance
Between failure and victory

Jumping off bridges

Jumping off bridges
You hoped the river
Made of glass
Would easily divide
Around your bird-boned weight
A fall, in mirrored rising
To a prayer’s clasped point
Almost as long as the world’s held breath
Shoulder turning
With that immaculate
Block and tackle inevitability
As if the curvature of the world
Were real, not just the lying distance
Where earth and sky collide
Where curves in opposition meet
In the wind-rush shout
A sun-pale flash of your smeared face
Realising, the world, neither curved
Nor made of glass
But, fragmenting apart
You are