Elisabeth Bletsoe

BIRDS OF THE SHERBORNE MISSAL XIX
Wodewale, Green Woodpecker (Picus viridis)
in memory of Anthony Bletsoe

Chips & bits, glittering, gritted. A regular split-fig; goes where the devil can’t & that’s between the oak & the rind. Shalt feed off stuff betwixt bark & bole, shalt never drink save when it rains. Pan-daemonium hatched from a piciform egg, lucifer rising. Surprising yellow. Northern meanderly blocking hot blocks of air, increasing shear under outbreaks of saharan dust albedo & volcanic aerosol underpins oceanic multidecadal oscillations. Protrusible & sticky. Sentinel woods cohere around a collapsed orchard nucleus. Leaf-scorch, needle cast; disease a message in the body text, bleeding canker micromoth incursive, black walnut nourished from the emanations of gathered dead. Inserted into the calyx throat; rose-purple, slightly notched with small & distant horny teeth, glaucous beneath. Dehiscent, drifting; smoothly white plumed. Pollen grains, the empty snail-spiral, drystone walling, bound together by lichen & wevet, fluctuant intra marginals. Travelled times before; land of the folke, accelerated migratory shifts push into untimely unsettlements of being. There’s an awful lot of blue sky left in this isn’t there? Antiphone as ornithography. Upright jizz, clumsily hopping. Come on & rest now.

into the trees crying pleu
pleu pleu pleu rain
foul wet tile wood
spate

BIRDS OF THE SHERBORNE MISSAL XX
Wop cok, male Bullfinch, (Pyrrhula pyrrhula)

Sometimes a little wool, hair, or a few feathers. Thick, quick-set in hedges or rough with scattered clumps & underlying blotches; plum bird, lum budder. That devoureth the blowthe of fruit. Muting & fluted retrieval of sequences from the inner cochlea of memory modules synchronously & strongly ululant, consecutive. Short & deep shiny black prominent, in soft unripened state. Maintaining a low profile. Nipped off, crushed, rolled around the tongue, discarded into wildings; a marmulate of cherries mingled with juice of rasps & red currants, floribunda. Pulviplume ghosting of birdstrike on glass. Things once loved, now betrayed, are cradled in absence; transition walls, projected on a ground of darker politics, still bear vestiges (carpel, petiole, stipule). One prick to the ball & the vision is lost, weaverlands falling into shadow, the butts, twelve-acre lane. Lilac fascia, iliac fossa. A pleasing fullness of belly, small fire like a stored pear; the finch the flame, how far can its light carry, smoke bent over the spring allotments. Borrowed radiance in recollection, intrinsical, mainlining straight down into earth, root-deep, crocked. Peradventure, to keep all year, there may be requisite a little more sugar.

all the joly briddes smale do
change their song & each moment lustrous
white

SNOW STILL FALLS IN ANTARCTICA
for Frances

“thin edges become highly unstable
leading to unexpected growth”

you see things
not there to be seen curator
in the museum of snowflakes

each a history of the
disappeared that once existed, frozen
orchestras of lost sound forgotten words caught as
breath-icicles

buried lakes
connected by

“clearly circular structures riverine networks
or pyramid formations” beneath the skin, covered

with ice-granules, like scars
or secret writing

cuneiform
bergs
on the opening leads the serrac & high pressure
ice-flowers are blooming again ridges
apparently
a deep & permanent rose phthalo blue

no mythology but
the mythology of failure, the sound
of a ticking clock in the locked wardroom of
a sinking ship

squally blotting out

ghostly shadows of silver, snow & fulmar petrels flashing close

“coming up the decisive point at issue (crux)
against” a difficult matter a puzzle
a hut-wall embedded with grease,
blubber smoke, reindeer hair, seal blood
melting guano

this austral light
the summer had barely been
with us at all & the birds are leaving us

you wonder how they survive
but they do
of course off course the maps are

are becoming discontinuous

Elisabeth Bletsoe is the curator of Sherborne Museum in her native Dorset. Her publications include Landscape from a Dream (Shearsman 2008) and Pharmacopoeia & Early Selected Works (Shearsman 2010). She has featured in various anthologies including Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, ed. Carrie Etter (Shearsman 2010), The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, ed. Harriet Tarlo (Shearsman Book 2011) and The Edge of Necessary: an Anthology of Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966-2018, eds. John Goodby and Lyndon Davies (Aquifer Books 2018). She is currently involved with the artist Frances Hatch, providing textual responses to her collages in the exhibition/publications Drawn to Antarctica and Chesil Moons. She has also collaborated with the Cambridge composer Kim B. Ashton, who has set several poems from Pharmacopoeia and Birds of the Sherborne Missal to music for piano and full orchestra.