Giles Goodland
The Slow Worms

She kept an old piece of carpet over
the compost and when you lifted it
the pipework recoiled into intestinal
heat. Longated potentates graved ceramic
silvers upon the molded potato, among
ash heavings they forthcame to ingest hummus—
crumb. When musics branched in this might of eye,
unlooking faces were named: asker
blet slayworm slew slorry or slow cripple.
Retained as a ghost word: properly slawerm,
or from schleichen, to creep, from soi-distant
slaha the smiter. The sky blanked and
singleleggedly down herepaths they
wended the stews past madameve’s.
This was not blindness to be in coil with,
coiting in a wood of desire, the intercourse
in their case of long duration, breath held head
for sense where surged the risk-averse
photophobe, beakerfolk of darkfold,
uroboreous urndead, pitdwellers spoking
through their sleep-crowned masks
upearthing the groundwound, viewing
where pigs had colonized distant hills
in the way the light is a stone that comes
apart, insurreptile glottus of molehill—
hole, nostrilled flute of the sorepoint they smelt
of sleep through eating out the edges of time,
the leaves were inns from the cold where time
sifted the raingodsent clouds swift between
clearings even without the night-crying
shrews that grubbed where onions bulbed and moles
degraded underlawn, where coldcocked worms
sophistically browsed upon henbane and sludged
in-death splendours, pleached the crepe pathway
within leg of loveamour and duskrain
evedammed the blackbird-crowned sky at ringing of
decadend until in raindusk they strayed
themselves askew in forms grosser than
huge, plumping with stained tactility.
Then she moved house again, and they stayed.

reprinted from The Masses, published by Shearsman Books.

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