The Common Flesh featured
in this issue
The Imaginative Life of Writers and Social Responsibility
_________
In previous issues:
Interview with Alison Croggon
Specula
Specula: Mirrors from the Middle Ages
Poetry
_______
To order
The Common Flesh
from Arc Publications
Attempts at Being from Salt
_______
Alison is editor of Masthead
_______
_______
Alison Croggon
Witch
leave your absence
for those moonblind hounds
they can’t snout
shadow from shudder
velvet from cowpat
repair to the clean night
which waits you
(for sweetness parsley
and marjoram to drive away serpents
and as remedy against the sour & queasy stomach)
hagridden by their own howlings
in thumbscrew nights
they conjure their feverings
of phlegm-pale flesh
biddable to vacancies
of bridle and bitten
of cold cunt flayed
on absolute stone
(st johns wort the most precious remedy
for any wound made
with a venomed weapon
henbane which avails
against all botches)
but you are a lustre
as predatory eyes
may not comprehend
icicle shattering always
to its brilliant spectra
womb of lightnings
(fragrance simmering
against the rim of speech
the bowl and the table
and such lilies
of the seemly and beautiful shape
that is their own virtue)
From Translations from Nowhere
behind the baroque
mask a blankness
inflicting itself in concentric circles
she asks:
is this really my own damage
or a wound torn in others
that they must diagnose
through my skin
predictable as a tragedy
leached of all colours
in which the painted actress
pouts and blinks
such blackening tears that all response chokes
on the absurd
ancient seductions
smudging the heart
and again: finally
in the yellow dusk I understand
how a book opened prematurely
might be a fatality
dazzling the mind’s innocence
so it forms a mirage
populous and exact in every detail
while the desert breathes
livingly beneath it
cheated of the eye
she asks again: what is more real
the life formed
out of our delusions
in all its tender
quickness of flesh or the vast
desiring cell
that mindless replication
swarming itself
out of its decay: or is this
not a question
the torment is always as the woman said
to find oneself speaking
like a bad novel though fiction is seldom
so misleading
as these selves we claim
to live by squatting
by middens of bones the sand
scours to whiteness
damasks of civilisation
woven by ill-used hands
rotting in those endless museums
of self regard
et cetera she asks:
if I have been asleep
how do the pains of dream
differ from waking
and how much does it matter?
this finger on this pulse
conscious as a snail
absorbing rain
to break a silence may be fatal
or at least injurious
but equally might startle a bower of wings
out of shaded interiors
the problem is to know what kind of silence
it may for instance be the quiet
of dusk when minds turn
inward to the animal that whickers
starwards wonderingly and settles
on loins of poetry
licking its teeth
or the wordlessness of the weary
who study full stops becoming
what they are and who dig their
dreams into the past having
already looted the future
and found there no sweetness
or a vacancy that might be love or disgust
but is the reverse of resignation
although it may sound similar
when dogs shout their evening greetings
through the purple suburbs
or it might be simply the indifference that masks
a loathing for inexactitude
a jeweller’s morality in which all petty speech
withers in shame
most perilous of all the silence
of a stern surface shining so blindingly
it frightens off words
with their own distorted reflections
but which breaks when it breaks
like glass in the raw flesh beneath it
