Ultrasound

Ultrasound

(To my unborn son)

Refracted by water

like a silver fish,

not pausing beneath sounds,

turning which way.

Through darkness,

through warm waters,

and the constant beat of my heart,

you flash fast.

“We’ve a wriggler here,”

she said,

seeking you out

like a shoal of cod.

The suddenly you are still

and stand clear

upon the screen

– a small child

with head and flickering heart.

We measure the circumference

of your skull,

your femur and spine.

It is not time yet

to draw you in,

into this cold airbound world.

This poem was first published in The Rialto

Czech fox

I have just submitted my poem Midday Fox for possible inclusion in an anthology. 

I have often blogged about my local fox in my Czech blog. I will see our local fox making its way across the fields as I walk up from the bus or down from the woods. And I have come to associate it with creativity. One of my favourite poems is Ted Hughes' Thought Fox, which is for my money the best poem about the writing process I know. 

As some readers of this blog will be aware one important reason why I bought my Czech house is that I needed somewhere to write. It is so to speak my den, my dark hole, built into the hillside, a hill called Fox's Lair. Over the last year I have indeed started to write again, and not just this blog, and superstitiously I have partly put it down to my fox companion. Even when I do not see him, I hear him in the woods above the house, tormenting the village dogs. "Ha!" he seems to be saying, "You have sold your freedom for a bowl of meat. I have the woods, all the roots and dark places as my kingdom." And at this the village dogs go mad with vain barking.

I have put his face on my door in the form of a brass knocker, he hangs on the wall as one of a set of horse brasses, I have drawn him in oil pastels. And the more I find out about him and his place in folklore and superstition, the more I think I have found the right familiar. A month or so ago I was telling my husband about this, and how strangely although I had been writing almost continuously, my fox had kept out of sight. My husband stopped me at this point "Look, look," he said. There in broad daylight no more than a metre away from the window my fox was strolling across the grass in the direction of the neighbours' chickens.