Here we are,
at the mist on the water,
sailing with all the best china.
Farewell to those days, receding
into forest on the shore.
Already we are unlike,
convinced,
that we were (are?) better
than we ever were before.
Dogs run the clover,
and they are a noise, a feeling
that something is wrapped up
in a sheet, tucked under the bed.
Do not… but you know that
this is where we are.
This is how it ends.
© Deanna Scutt, 2020
Aculeata
No, I have not forgotten you.
Childish, to dwell on it,
but what can you expect?
Tiny mountain flowers
may cling, in the storms,
but I slithered into the water.
It was a silken cold kiss.
A kindness, or killing,
in which I could shift between skins.
So many wasps by my ears,
when all I wanted, so quietly,
was to tie my hands up in your hair.
Unrequited, I think, but I do wonder
about relics and ruins, rotting
in the earth, though all of it is now
irrelevant.
We have not spoken in how long?
So many pages, cities and tides.
We and the world have changed.
© Deanna Scutt, 2020
Hestia
Goddess, child.
I have loved thee as my sister,
but what must you think
as I crawl in from the rocks?
As a child I heard of men
who refused to bring their wars home.
‘We’ve no stories worth the telling.
What’s done is over and done.
Bring us our bread and water,
and let’s leave the dead, dead.’
Remember them when you read
the patches on my scalp,
the broken timber of the vessel
I leave strewn across the beach.
What can be said?
What can be done?
Words are not a palliative medicine –
I have been cured of such putrid faith.
I am this, only. A salt-streaked wretch
pawing blindly at your skirts.
Please, do not ask me, Alabaster.
Just walk me the long way home.
© Deanna Scutt, 2020
An Understanding
I walked
to see a lake full
of drowned rusting cars.
So much iron in that water
that when I swam my head
tingled, like I was licking blood
from a cut.
Do you know it took me years?
That though I love rivers
I would float, and feel a blackness
snaking up to my neck.
Those who do not know me
(and perhaps those who do)
will tell you that I dive like a stone,
accelerating into closing spaces
with a will to the descent.
No more names on that list,
so I say, with toes curled:
this has been the most terrible
embarrassment.
© Deanna Scutt, 2020
Guillemot
You, the hammer to my anvil,
were we ever like twins?
Another year, and I will have lived
more years with you
than I foundered alone
in tide pools, hunting for the moon.
Am I a storm lantern,
or a rope tied to your waist
as you navigate the darkness?
I drank the salt and strayed
from the sands where I was born,
until the spools of discarded plastic
carried me in to shore.
Such adventures to tell you,
and I throw the words skyward,
into a mass of screaming grey birds.
A prayer that this reaches you.
You who sailed from here,
generations ago.
© Deanna Scutt, 2020
I Don’t Want to Write About Us
The first pink dusk
to the dog roses,
since I last saw your face.
Age of plague,
the Anthropocene,
and the year the needle
caught the back of my thread.
I tore holes in the picture I’d sewn.
We are a six,
and another.
A bet for desperate times.
© Deanna Scutt, 2020
Pigeon
Two weeks of interim,
and you are a dream
without end.
Breathless, weightless,
I dig out the old songs,
and remember the time
that I almost died.
Something in the way
the air shifts
at the window,
and I’m stretching
towards the warm glass.
Legs click,
as the day closes to an end.
© Deanna Scutt, 2020
The Way of It
Breath like a moth,
flutters and strains
down in the dark caves inside you.
Two years, borrowed time,
but we have no more manners.
Bloody nails and
teeth of the beast;
we rip hours from the hands of the clock.
This spring has been
so much black earth.
No biblical rainstorms,
but a long wet moan.
Vaporous mornings for our war
of attrition.
How long now?
Sometimes I stand at my window
and watch for a car pulling up.
No warding, this vigil,
but a weight on my chest.
The needling claws of a cat.
© Deanna Scutt, 2020
Grapes
Two months without paper
and there’s a god in the sink.
Day visions of a man,
but I am now too far removed.
A train is coming;
dull shudder in the ground.
So long, we ignored it,
breathing steam
over cups made of salt.
Now the station, in the woods,
and we run for our tickets,
throwing money, old money,
like shot into a cannon.
I have forgotten my bag,
my coat and my shoes.
Still, we go,
with damp hair,
to meet the unmaker.
© Deanna Scutt, 2020
Fly By Night
Winged bugs swarm
in rising grey clouds,
and the trees stand
without uniform.
Here the earth gleams,
embraces a leg to the knee,
that black below bronzed leaves.
The thicket is still.
It whispers, hides the antlers,
as a fox bounds across the path.
Old shadows rise,
take their place in this scene,
where the stream breathes
white fog.
Moths join bats
and blue is made black
until the moon.
Then silhouettes
flicker
through pines and aspen.
© Deanna Scutt, 2019
Darker Fables 