by Paul Matthews

We have been given the theme of
wounds and how to heal them,

but why sit with our eyes shut
when a candle burns at the centre?

Things long to be looked at.

Yes, the least knot in a floorboard
deflects us from the path. Its grain

bleeds where the branch was, then
ripples a beauty around it.

by Paul Matthews

Who appointed me
to this high office?

I do what’s needed,
bend my knee
to read the midnight
signature of snails
across my doorstep.

My employment is
to mind the overlap
where self and leaf
braid into the wind
their ifs and maybes.

School unmused me
with its dictations.
Why are we not told
that every small thing
is inlaid with fable?

Fool that I am,
I give my life to this.

by Paul Matthews

We have hung the Green Man
on a nail behind the shrubbery,

and though it seems only
a likeness stamped on a tile

the look that he gives says
twine all that you are
into every frond of the garden.

His apple tree is in bloom.
Not a petal has fallen.

But who could befriend him?
He lies in the dirt. The crown

of his handiwork a graveyard
where roses run wild

by Paul Matthews

She, whoever she was, she
guided us through the painted
caves last summer.

The air made us giddy.
I’m still high on it, imagining
how shadows of earlier visitors

twisted into stags and horses
round the lamp they tended.
She showed us claw marks,

lines in parallel, scored
before ever our kind carried
their frail names in.

We touched bedrock there,
testing where world ends
and the mind begins.

This hallowed place, she said.
Its colours speak in sleep.
Its cries are all about us.

Nobody forgets those horses,
or the bison–women brooding
in the hollows of the rock–face.

We spun giddy with them
in the flickering light and left
our footprint.