David Hawkins

Cousining

The village shop sells time
capsules and safety matches.

A tide moves unknowably blue
behind a screen of trees.

It sees us and raises us,
while a boar god lathers the hillside

in green time, its hackles
striping the nascent moon.

All the clocks in this low-ceilinged parlour
are pendulous and spin

on tilted axes, each tells
its discrete time differently,

waiting for someone who
has time to work it out,

between fried egg sandwiches
and passages of fighter jets, while

in sky-rimmed hourglass pools
shrimps disguised as sand

sift minute boulders of colour
along their feathery flanks.

To open one and view the mechanism
would be to observe

a perfect escapement
immeasurably dwindling away.

An adit buried in long grass
is a good place to store a disused voice,

as huge hoppers full of weather
are poised over the mountains

over the sea, over Ireland,
which is just an idea from here.

David Hawkins is a writer, book editor and naturalist from Bristol, England. Recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Arc Poetry, Blackbox Manifold, BlazeVOX, B O D Y, Datableed, Magma, Molly Bloom, Otoliths and White Review. He was awarded second prize in the 2015 UK National Poetry Competition.