Silver Branch series
Jane Lovell
Jane Lovell's latest collection is The God of Lost Ways (Indigo Dreams publishing), which was joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial prize (2020). This Tilting Earth, winner of the Mslexia prize, was published by Seren in 2018. Jane also writes for Dark Mountain and Elementum Journal. She is Writer-in-Residence at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve.
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Twitter: @wordcurlz
FB: jane.lovell.3760
Spill
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Snow and salt-ice melt and pool
on tracts of frozen sea.
Pools bloom with algae and bacteria
carried in waves,
in dust-storms from Siberia,
in rain falling.
Brimming sunlight,
they spill their teeming slicks to krill
and copepods, amphipods, fish, seals
and whales
and deeper still,
to seabed dwellers, hidden feeders,
brittle stars.
Below the pools, the sea-ice darkens,
feeds on scattered light.
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Published in 'Deep Time 2', Black Bough poetry 2020
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Map of Disko Bay 1925
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Stitched into seal skin,
a patchwork of islands carved from driftwood,
their colours sea-bleached stored light
depicting stone, leaf, shore.
Between them, the carcass of a boat tilts
in the tide, its buckled timbers
saturated oak heft from heartwood,
its core
the light of ancestors:
scattered shadows thrown across the warm earth
of another world, and those it sheltered
gone to bone.
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Published in 'Deep Time 2', Black Bough poetry 2020
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Walrus Tusk with Scrimshaw, 1912–1916
Baffin Island, Nunavut
Ways of the caribou,
herds of caribou, scored in enamel;
bays and lakes, lagoons and hills,
uncharted mountains sunk in mists,
the line of coast
a faltering scratch
surfacing where the waves come in,
their rinse across stone only imagined;
and in the foreground angular dogs
dragging a sled across a fissured ocean
dwarfed by whales.
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Published in 'Deep Time 2', Black Bough poetry 2020
"I choose my words carefully. An essential element of nature poetry, for me, is that it is grounded in science and natural history, that it is anchored, to some degree, in fact. In the same way that I collect natural objects, I gather information, essays and images from all over the world: myriad minutiae, details that may later be woven into the texture of a poem."
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Originally published in edition 4 of Elementum Journal.
Pheasant
He will not blend with stone,
displays himself resolutely,
buffeted as he is, tousled
and leaf-bombed by gales
of passing traffic,
one glazed eye
in that perfectly-combed brow
oblivious to the broken
terracotta, charcoal,
bone of him
and the spindles of his wings
opening and closing
as if some strange semaphore
could summon the gods
to resurrect him.
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Exclusive to the 'Silver Branch' series.
From 'The God of Lost Ways' (2020), Indigo Dreams.
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The wings kill me
The wings kill me,
folded like that
as if to fend off light,
her skull between my fingers
- a blackcap's pale egg -
such a fragile thing,
its smudged pigment
calcite bloom.
Once she was all beak
and desperate,
soft as soot, soft as the dark.
Now, legs snapped stalks,
her whole being is papered in
and balanced on its keel,
ribs a coracle
floundering in a sea
of black space.
Above her
lost days tilt bright and
unreachable
at the chimney's edge.
Oh the song she'll never sing,
the softest song held like a prayer
in her silent form.
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Exclusive to the Silver Branch project.
From 'The God of Lost Ways' (2020), Indigo Dreams.
Perspective in a Hare's eye
Skyline erupts into tree, backlit and spilling
its own horizon across a perfect black moon,
an anti-matter moon brimming
deep pool silence: a world where nothing moves
till a thousand fathoms down, blunt and primeval,
they drift at you, curious at your veins fizzing,
your mouth yielding glassy planets of air.
Jaws champ, lamp-eyes drift back into blackness.
The moment holds you in its ocean.
This is the place where no one will find you:
no one sees you, except the hare, sudden
and skyswept, poised on a grassblade of decision.
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Published in 'Deep Time' 1 edition. Black Bough 2020.
First published in Bare Fiction Magazine.
