Featured Poem

I

‘Oumuamua, tumbling in the galactic flow
like the lopped head of anguilla, breaking
the bounds of the fixing star, the grasp
of the lunging planets, her loosed crag
crashing through gravity’s fences and coursing
to wing-finned Pegasus, the oceans
of leaping Equuleus. Tetherless mustang,
wild interstellar tarpon, unlassoed, unbroken,
roaming the range from apogee to perigee—
until Gamma Equulei’s switchback aphelion
slings her back to Centauri’s dazzling Sargasso.

II

Earth orbiting like a longed Lipizzaner,
a goldfish in a pool, eccentric, oblique,
precessional: the Milankovitch ducks
line up off Humber, flee south from the ice-locked,
shrinking sea to the deltas of Ushant,
where elvers ascending under the floes
enter the stream of the broad Fleuve Manche,
press on to the subarctic rivers of Rhine.

Earth nailed to the Sun like a hoary vulture,
a birch leaf trapped in the meltwater whorl.
The basking perihelion widens the ascent
from the Río de Oro to the Norwegian Trench,
the swollen lodes of Europe. Eustatic
Atlantic shoves back the estuarine outfalls;
meanders flatten in floodplains to fen.

Earth circling like an index finger
daubing red ochre, a pack of wolves
or howling men, at bay round a phalanx
of roaring aurochsen. Pelicans panic,
cranes bugle and trumpet, beavers
slap their rubbery platypus tails—
thirty-foot sturgeon ramming their dams,
salmon taller than men leaping over.

III

Reed hut above the oxbow, holme
in the cranes’ black kjarr. Red men, bone hooks
and barbed harpoons. Cowhide coracles,
dugout log canoes. Pigs prowl the edge
of the campfire’s glow, whelps licking grease
from children’s fingers—earth-shudder
sky-split thunder: eyes lifted to the North:
horizon blitzed with shock-launched wigeon,
detonating greylag. The shivering hills stampede
with tarpan, washed down on the galloping tide,
maelstrom forests of ripped-out alder, tumbling
herds of white-eyed, screaming bison.

Daybreak in the wreck of Dogger. Gulls drifting
over the slowly rising sea. Seals hauled-out
on sandbanks, bleached ribs of stranded whales.
Dunlin and knot, swarming the mudflats,
armies of silt-spearing godwit and whaup.
Butterbumps booming from brackish phragmites,
gorged on the bootlace bounty. Harriers
quartering over. Campfire wisp from the holme’s relief
in the pearl of the roseate dawn; boat slides
from creek into tidal waters, trailing
its fuchsia ripple. Paddles out under chatter
of pinking terns, the flushed conflagrations
of billionfold gyring flamingos.