Back
Heathcliff
Today she dreamed a man, delineated with her pen.
Before the ink was dry his eyelids lifted
and his black eyes shone.
She saw how she had stirred his heart.
His essence issues from the wind,
familiars; shadows, briars, the precipice.
His foot's a hoof.
His heartbeat comes within the body of a hawk.
Pen, paper, ink and thought have caught him,
tied him into words; a wretched animal,
enraged and cast within a trap.
And she, a wrist that rubs against a broken pane of glass,
and says the spirit's gist is also warm at last.
She dreams too fast,
and spirit touches flesh too much and cymbals clash,
and love is dashed, and roars the moor,
a hound possessed, a fiend,
its bloody gore a savageness she rides.
And the hawk's beak strives
to peck the eyes of pain.
It scales the cliff.
What need of flesh? Her spirit soars!
The owl screeches, and the night falls fast.
Curtainless, her window points the way to stars.
They too are rooted into rock, and gleam
an otherness, that seems like love.
Wendy Bardsley
© Wendy Bardsley 2014