Canto VIII – Toppa’s Village

Oft I had alone at every dawn

My sorrows to lament – none living now is there

To whom my heart I dare

Openly declare.

-        The Wanderer

Goat skin, carved, cured and stretched

into a heartbeat – that was the first

fell hammer against the buzzard’s ear

when it guzzled spleen and watched

the arrival of man. It tattooed again

into the setting sun and once more

into the morning until the buzzard

could no longer distinguish between

the footsteps or thuds of brick and grave

and bowl and the bird was shot and skewered

and its tiny porcelain skull rolled over the strawed

floor in the playful palms of a child;

that was when they knew

this was Toppa’s village. Strange sounds,

strange birds and colours and soon the stink

of blood and wine and the buzzards saw

great wooden plumage cutting the

ocean’s jaw and men cowering in

their timber avian bellies. Soot and smoke

calcified into whitewashed catacombs

spilling in avenues and dribbling down

the paved quay and the buzzards nicked

their nicotine-beaks and wondered why

the woman had come to Topsham. Swept up

by a Gale, Tryphena abandoned adolescence,

torched the leazes, and picked Toppa’s pasture

to bury Hardy’s ring and grow the gold

to flower. Buzzards and fishermen

and deserving mouths ate sweetbread

from her fist and lapped the kindness which

spills from heart-cracks and the birds held

assembly with their corvid cousins and

made covenant to never strike the neck

of a worm which reared from Tryphena’s

grave. Hardy blew in with the snow; dark

and occupied – the buzzard resumed

its lapine dissections and did not heed

the hurried note sacrificed on the cross

in memory of a muse or a lover

but when those ink-stained atriums and ventricles

clutched and thundered from his chest

this hunched killer balled its wings

and pelted for the mantle – terrified

that in that empty churchyard

it had once more heard

the sound of drums.

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