bex hainsworth

FLOODPLAIN

Skipton, North Yorkshire

The fields are a bowl, filled.

A glacier once scraped out

the entrails of the valley,

leaving an oyster shell,

an altar plate ready for silver.

The river bulges

like a dead thing left to the air.

Its mirrored body is burst open:

a hasty gutting. Each pool,

each grey pocket, an amputated scale.

Mallards float on the upturned

belly like pilotfish.

Dry stone walls rise

from the slippery husk, brown

and purple, the exposed

veins of a leviathan.

And where the water thickens to mud,

rams stand in the sod, horns curled

into urchins, and observe, unconcerned.

Open gates and fenceposts

gather, shipwrecks in the shallows.

Trees shoulder their broken branches,

masts, crosses, and gesture

in vain towards higher ground.

previously published in Green Ink Poetry