Tattoo via Simon Armitage’s book Walking Away, 2015
***
CHILD’S PARK
What did they mean to you, the azaela flowers? Those girls were so happy, rending the branches, Embracing their darling bouquets, their sumptuous trousseaux, The wet, hot-petalled blossoms. Seizing their day, Having a good time. Your homicidal Hooded stare met them head on. As if they were stealing the brands Of your own burning. I hurried you off. Bullfrogs Took you down through lily tangle. Your fury Had to be quenched. Heavy water, Deeper, deeper, cooling and controlling Your plutonium secret. You breathed water.
Freed, steadied, resurfaced, your eyes Alit afresh on colour, so delicate, Splitting the prism, As the dragonflies on the solid lilies. The pileated woodpecker went writhing Among the catalpas. It clung To undersides and swooped Like a pterodactyl. The devilry Of the uncoiling head, the spooky wings, And the livid cry Flung the garden open. You were never More than a step from Paradise. You had instant access, your analyst told you, To the core of your Inferno– The pit of the hairy flower. At a sunny angle The fountain threw off its seven veils As the air swayed it. Here was your stair– Alchemy’s seven colours. I watched you as you climbed it all on your own Into the mouth of the azaela.
You imagined a veil-rending defloration And a rebirth out of the sun-mixed up together And somehow the same. You were fearless To meet your Father His Word fulfilled, there, in the nuclear core.
What happens in the heart simply happens.
I stepped back. That glare Flinging your old selves off like underthings Left your whole Eden radioactive.