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Poems By Gill McEvoy |
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Holding On.
The rose boughs dip with the weight of bud.; Under a lazy leaf of green It is good to be,
Deer Signs.
We’re following a blue tourist bus that ricochets off potholes, explodes into sky, showering our windscreen in dust and grit.
Its driver is furious because he ‘weren’t contracted to have no car followin’’. So here we are, struggling to keep up while he roars
down America’s dirt-roads, shaking his passengers up like milk and not giving a holy damn. At last he loses us, his dust-cloud
no longer discernible. Now I must read the map. Except, out here in the Badlands, there are no signs. We stop. Just ahead of us I see
a deer humped by the thin grass verge, its pale tan sides still new. And I know we’re hot on the trail. We go on. Later I’ll check the wheels of that bus
for blood: out here in the Badlands things are still bad enough.
Growing up.
She would tremble on the ridges of the tractor ruts, arms out, keeping frightened balance - “In the ruts the water lies, in the water stand the trees, in the water there is sky” going on as far as she could see, forever, to infinity (though infinity was not a word she was then familiar with) – If she should fall she feared she’d spiral down and down, and disappear.
Now she knows it isn’t so; She ploughs, like me, straight through the small seas of the ruts, bold in her red boots, stirring up the mud like coffee in a cup. She knows infinity is not down there, She’s heard the sky’s a finite thing which we can pierce and pock with holes: no need to hover on the ridges now, arms spread wide like wings of startled bird.
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