The Aire bridge

There’s a bridge I know that’s very strange.
Water flows above it, not below.
People walk beneath it, not across.
And birds fly straight through the bridge
as if its bricks were made of air.

One day it snowed and the bridge disappeared.
The locks were all frozen
and when I tried to sail my boat there
it skidded like a tray
down a mountainside

The bridge is broken at both ends.
That’s why I love it.
The sky is in the river,
the earth is in the clouds
and the wind is nowhere.

Deer poem in monosyllables

In the lee of dusk
when no one’s round to see
the shy brown deer
file from the wood
and cross the field
to crop the wheat
that had reached five feet
but was lopped last week
to leave just stalk
and scrats of grain
which is what they eat
- their mouths in the earth

but their eyes like glass
tipped up to catch the light -
till dogs at the farm
on long steel chains
catch a whiff in the wind
of their sweat and heat
and set off such a storm
of yaps and barks
that the air turns dark
and the snap of a twig
makes the deer take fright
and they race as one

back to the wood
where their brown patched coats
and grey salt rumps
are lost to light
and they slip to the source
where there is no one

Besom

As well as the witches who made crops fail,
heifers drop dead, troublesome neighbours
take to their bed and never get up again

there was one whose potions made the blood sing,
so when she took you under her wing
what you found wasn’t a broom of knobbly twigs

but a brush so softly bristled that to ride it
was escstatic and led you to fresh meadows
over hills you’d never climbed before.

Back

A griming of snow along the moortops,
Sunlight wading through a summer colt,
Ringed by horse chestnuts and a rookery,
Near the flush Leeds-Liverpool canal.
A long shiver down the back of the land:
Even in June it has that chilliness,
The wind whistling over the switchbacks,
The hayfields ruffled then glossy
Like the fur down a labrador’s spine.
My dream-life, a home to home in on
We took the canal bridge at West Marton,
Treading air for a moment like young lambs.

Riddle Song

It is the most beautiful bridge,
over which no man has yet walked,
but it is a curious thing,
that over it the waters hang.
And under it the people walk all dry,
and look at it glad/cheerily,
boats sail through it,
birds fly through it enterprisingly.
Yet it stands firm in the snow,
demanding neither duty nor toll.