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Lia BrooksPoetry and Painting
Elk in the White WindI have made a scarf for you. It is plaid--
not to match your accent, but your mountainside.
It can snow there, midsummer.
How strange to know white
could surround you. I have not seen you cold.
The cabin juts between summit and lake
where fish stop along the beds like statues.
You write about their grey hard bodies
cracking on the stove. The taste of earth, startling
against the brittle nothing of outside.
I imagine long shadows on the flats. Lost footprints
under a frost sun and chough wingspan--
tones of a landscape. Elk lift their heavy heads
to the sharp wind, listening.
You stand in the doorway, your eyes on them
and the distance; how you translate
the contrast between morning and afternoon.
The scarf turns several colours at your neck;
noticeable against your mountain. I’ll remind it
that you are different, that you won’t be staying.
Lia Brooks Lime trees in a morning bedroom.I hadn’t noticed how they change sleep.
The way they lean over the covers in those early hours
when a room is dormant. I have woken up
to their white and heavy grief before now,
when the walls are forming the narrow bark.
It has been an expectation that I come from sleep
into their woodland. They alter upon the season
and I become dependent, revising my body
to imitate leaves, deep green and scored with care
so that I might go unnoticed. But that they begin
before this, before daylight has searched a room
from the small v of the curtains, is the surprise
of a mother’s arm around a woman long missing.
I could lie and say I see the last of the ring ouzels
nesting in the trees, lurid song
mournful of loneliness and long flight, but the room
makes no mention of them. There are no birds,
no insects or animals. A river running
from the alcove, among the trees, to my bed,
never appears. The wind comes cold
through the branches, the seeds spin on lime wings.
And when a throat has opened in the warm scent
of flowers it is only this; the infrasound of low talking
while I sleep in answers I forget long before waking.
Lia Brooks WoodsYou weren’t like them,
not this crowd, this city of trees, each bole
closely housed with the next,
rooftops competing.
But they fascinated you. Nightjars
sneaking across town squares
of openness, sun on their backs,
caught like thieves and pinned
like random interruptions.
How you wanted to explain them
and the curlews
appearing, dissolving again
into that night time of alleyways.
It was a place you’d go missing in.
Without the rare flint of city evenings; stars
catching on a sky momentarily,
you were lost in the dousing.
You wanted visibility
and found it at the end of the journey
where the gorse, yellowed
like bright signposts, could draw you
to a naked hill and its single tree-- exclusive,
exposed and like some profit
branching across the daylit page.
You didn’t want me there,
you wanted to sit under it, listen
without interruption,
without feeling foolish.
I wandered away, left you to it,
found tadpoles darting
like a thick puddle of black eyes, snakes
shifting between the dry heather
like lime or striped ribbons. A pony followed me
back to you, watched me smoke
under your tree, negotiate closeness
with careful words.
Lia Brooks The NoiseI come to meet you.
The south bank, trees unleashed
like winter scarecrows.
The empty water sucking stones
and the bulbous tree-root; a giant’s knee,
foot lost to the riverbed. I can’t remember
how you described the noise, or the holes
our ankles made, trout curious.
I come to meet you.
The red factory, walls and windows
fallen on the river. Reflection rocking
side to side like a boat, sky at the door
tapping light through the surface. The ripples
are still small gashes, blood of the woodland.
Your idea that our legs were taken.
I come to meet you
thirteen years on the path from Salmonleap,
sun speaking slowly to the cold bracken,
rod against the giant’s hip, fish, strung
from a low branch, glistening. I ask
for your time. You say it’s the same noise
that thumps a body sideways. The same wells
circling our ankles that pull sound
through the water, beneath it, into the earth.
That’s how we were taken.
Lia Brooks The RowanThe dark comes in across the water.
A low cobra, wide-necked and ready
to spring forward on the throat of twilight.
I am on my haunches at the mud shore,
waiting for the venom,
confused how day left me
walking from Tarbet. The rowan scry
from the edge of the loch, fingers on the mist.
The pike shift--
flecked stomachs rub the stone bed.
I catch my face on them
in that light of blackness without metallics
or butter
dripping from the hook of a moon
onto their backs. It’s this kind of light
that makes a woman nocturnal,
finding a world form below shadows
as her eyes adjust. The water of this dark
soaks my cheek, issues scenes like a poem.
Brings torch-eyed owls, like witches,
calling spells from the branches.
As bats string a crocheted tail around the sycamores,
I wonder that I have come full-faced
with myth; his long felt body
unfolding from the mountains,
across the water
to my knees, deer
running his abdomen. I am bit--
the sharp smile already at my shoulder.
Stung until I’m sideways.
Two puncture holes, stories bleeding out.
Lia Brooks The DriveThe drive back is fitful.
Lia Brooks A Stoat's MealYou gave me permission to hate.
I must have been a stoat,
sitting in the chair opposite you,
finally allowed to crawl under the fence, walk
from the hayfield to the farmyard,
into the chicken house.
You said, this is how to hold a person responsible.
The feathers rode up to the wooden ceiling, unsettled.
In my anger, the clucks, the shrieks were far off
in the darkness of evening.
Blood fell from my lips, sickly and warm
as I bit into the base of the skull,
to the centres of the brain responsible for breathing.
Lia Brooks Embroidery of a CrayfishLet me take you on then, sew up the gash with blue necks and florets. By the bed, cornflowers float in a jug. You fever the last of sleep, their blue quills fanning the ugly words from your chin. And all the time, your hands are taken in turn, washed, dried, laid back on your chest. It is early May, the horse chestnut is in blossom. Cream petals lose themselves slowly over the garden. Find the sill as dunes, birds in them pecking for ants, watching for sudden movements. You crack the carapace, needle through with legs and pincers, the wound in your thigh shaped like a knife and smiling. I re-stitch the stems, tie the ends tightly like a surgeon, this blue ocean gape caught and closed. Sometimes beads resurface, push under the stitches, touch along your skin like escape. This is you then, desperate to leave. The sparrows go and afternoon comes at the window as rain on the desert, turning to glue. The scent is bringing you awake remembering walls, the low light, the way you wanted to solve time quickly, the remains of a shell on the carpet. You’ll swallow it down a small mouthful at a time, the scar lost underwater, taking the shape of cornflowers.
Lia Brooks Quiet Rooms
Cold has it, undoes it, gives it away to evening.
It is more a pulling than release. Lungs did not exhale this.
If there is a rope it has gone unfelt, yet it has drawn,
and does draw-- collapsing ribs. It is certainly a freeness
that asks a throat to open. How well-like
receiving newness. That tree, the lake, some small part of space;
offered, and expanding in the quiet rooms of a chest.
Lia Brooks The Cats in Merrilynn
I have had my fill of tigers. A seraph wades in this water, me at her heels. What a ripple I cause behind her, the reeds, bent like little fidelities, sent shuddering.
I make myself shape her face. The full and furred body of an otter is only a reflection to float the surface. Practiced. Taking to trout, like I have to conditioning.
The markings are topaz. I wear them like protection. The setting sun in each one and framed with bars. What they keep out, they will keep me in. I follow contours
of river. The mountains, giant-like and raw, more miles than tigers swim.
Lia Brooks
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Invite as friend
