Deep Water

Water levels still rising as thousands hit by worst floods

in modern British history.  - The Guardian 24/7/07

While rain thrums on the roof

of the Cobalt Unit

you lie motionless, as directed,

in its womb-tight scanner.

The young radiologist counts down

and you think, I'm flying –

your rick-rack bones opening,

their long-drawn white

becoming pinions,

everything ratcheting out, peg after peg

into wing-tips,

afloat

on streaming black.

That black thuds and races

between your ribs –

and a pillow bunches hard against the ear

where blood roars   

      like floodwater

rising between contour-lines –

the floods you must get home through.

Milling dark your skeleton

dowses from this afternoon scan,

out of the hammering MRI machine,

its reverb and yammer.

*

A chalk spine

lies above these collapsed roads and trees,

choric bystanders

and cars doomed to muddy rivers.

Continually in sight, the Downs

slash a transverse elevation

through levelled fields

and water –

The high hills,

         always with us

like inequity, mauvais chance,

the clatter of bad news

in a consulting room.

In limestone pastures, though,

everything shifts with the water table

whose grit slips yellow

from your tap,

stinks when you open the car bonnet

to the sun.

*

Imagine the spine's

      fossil curve:

how it sinks a hook into the dark.

Seahorse remnant, residual ammonite.

Seep, silt, the pelvic crescent's

alluvial sex smell –

darknesses, compressed

as fear compresses,

to drift-shapes, fish mouthed

on ocean floors,

   half-recognisable

in some black-and-white dream.

The mineral spine

ground feather-thin,

eroded by air-stream dark

to an archaic lace,

like figures raised in grainy stone

among alders –

whose dark silhouettes

stud the flood-water –

spires prayer climbs past,

breath

floating free of everything mineral,

rising from this bedroom:

where curtains

keep out the night-whisper of rain