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Dominic Weston
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the poet
Dominic Weston makes wildlife programmes for television, runs over the Mendip hills, and writes poetry. His work has appeared in numerous print and online magazines, journals and anthologies, including Ink, Sweat & Tears and Green Ink Poetry. Once, he even slipped off the page into poetry film. Dominic's work veers into the natural world – often with a healthy undercurrent of darkness. Adopted as a baby, and having lost both parents to prolonged illness in recent years, Dominic treasures most the poems he writes about his family.
the poems
November
Scissoring volleys snip across the dripping field
call and counter-call sewing lines of reassurance
between fleets of long-tailed tits as they slip
westwards from the cider orchard through the
beeches to infiltrate a long thorn hedge
Half the front leg of a roe deer is sheathed in
mud-washed fur, a finger of matt bone
protruding at one end, a black flinty hoof at the
other – rejected by the nose of a curious hound
articulated by the shunt of a cautious boot
Ghost memories of deer appear along the
Fosseway in the dun flanks of fallen field stone
greenish with algae
half-light fashioning their features
Pale flashes on the path, peroxide husks
look like Bambi tails
not the fallen maize wraps
from a squirrel’s overhanging store
Thwud!
Strikingly rigid and damp-dense
Millie claps my knee backs with an over-long branch
Labrador trots her pride in the mimic trophy –
her own piece of Jane Doe
Beneath our feet limestone knucklebones push up
through the blackspots of let down sycamore palms
yellowing gloves smooth the naked crevices
November is the time when the ground is made.
The Daedalus I Knew
Inspired by the bronze statue
Daedalus Equipping Icarus
by Francis Derwent Wood
The father of Icarus is on his knees,
left hand deftly lacing a leather cuff
around his son’s bicep, while the right carries
the weight of the wings
It was not my father but my mother
who knelt before her own boy wonder
to tie the laces on my new school shoes and
launch me into the world
Daedalus’ rapt attention to his son
as unimaginable to me as flight itself,
a pantomime played out on a mythical isle,
nothing I could know
My mother sprang my father from the
loveless island his parents confined him to
determined that her own children would never
see its brittle shores
My father’s skills earned the salary that
paid for tan sandals in the summer and
black lace-ups in winter, that put food on
the table year round
So no, he never did kneel before me
to tie my laces or straighten my wings,
but he lent me his place in my mother’s heart
and that selfless act let me fly
And The Third Wish
It would be an unseasonably warm afternoon
when I would turn myself inside out
start to roll the skin back from my crown
unrooted hair flopping down onto my chest
the skin slinking over shoulders to the ground
An unexpected easterly wind would rise
making it a very good day for laundry
so into the tub with it, and half a box of soda
to scrub, scrub, scrub with the old bristle brush
and then three times through the mangle
The hottest part of the day would see me
sitting in the shade on that stool from St David’s
with its three clawing rhododendron legs
me thinking about nothing in particular
until my freed skin flapped bone dry in the wind
Once the steam from pressing had dissipated
I’d take out my reglazed glasses and look
for the first time into every crevice and wrinkle
survey the landscape supported by my fingers
and audit my own hide for scars
Out of the long-crushed grey shoebox
I’d lift the gold leaf embosser I’d liberated
from Reading Grammar’s library stores
retired from inscribing Dewey’s digits
on leather spines in favour of cold hard print
Plugged in the mains and finally hot to its tip
I’d parsimoniously press through foiled tape
to fill in the full extent of every scar I’d found
with a thin shield of gold, soon gone cold
the chink in my cheek where it kissed
the steel-lined typewriter case in the hall
the dent in my forehead where it struck
the brake lever of my Raleigh Tomahawk
the grave accent over my right eyebrow
inscribed by an open can of baked beans
Then my hands, oh my hands!
my pride, my strength, my means
the scenes of countless crimes and remedies
so many nicks, so many cuts, so many gouges
painstakingly gilded into delicate koi scale gloves
At the end of this burnished afternoon
I’d slowly pack my tools away for the last time
then burn my clothes in that rusting rubbish bin
carefully step back into my newly sequinned skin
and shimmer my way to Gomorrah.
Publishing credits
November: exclusive first publication by iamb
The Daedalus I Knew: The Language of Salt (Fragmented Voices)
And The Third Wish: Gallus supplement of Poetry Scotland
(Issue 101)
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