Gazelle
Among the garden’s green-lit stems
within the pisé arch, a woman’s framed
with shadows, knees demurely hemmed
where sunlight burnishes her auburn hair,
lustrous in the noonday fires.
Close-by an Uncle Crocodile presents his gazelle of the desert, owning one eye’s larger than the other –
since looking draws you in. She doesn’t mind,
she puts aside a compliment.
On the road I meet a dusty kitten, or the street is dusty she was in, she squeezed her lids with mild content:
sunshine’s potential on the kerb. Passing on,
satisfaction rests with a secret found in faces.
In town one sees the little cats in ecstasies of expectation
pregnant any time of year, and
when they have their little bodies:
great purring, great purring.
Turbot
It would please me for a spell to live among
the bright, quick shoals which breed along the shallow reef, eat nothing – plankton – and,
being young and nimble, turn as one
on each swift passing current.
But I more like the giant turbot am who roams the ocean floors, lugubrious or like the carp in amber, sluggish streams
at constant feed, lips fat and swollen til punctured by a fisherman’s barbed line.
Dominic James lives in the South West near the source of the Thames, he attends poetry meetings along the M4 Corridor and sometimes further afield as part of Peter Pegnall’s occasional, Bright Scarf group, last seen in October at the Poetry Café on Betterton Street. Dominic's collection, Pilgrim Station, was published by SPM Publications in 2016 and he has recently been published in The High Window and several UK anthologies. His blog needs feeding at: www.djamespoetic.blogspot.co.uk
Find More of Dominic's Poetry at:
https://ninemusespoetry.com https://abegailmorley.wordpress.com Poetry Shed http://www.ekphrastic.net