COOK’S DOG  

       
Its story is seldom told:
the way it crouched and slowly rose like a scissor jack,
sprang from the longboat three feet from land,
splashed, bucked and bounded ashore,
wet-nosed a dingo,
sniffed around the outback,
watered the scrub,
came back with convicts in one eye
and Sydney Opera House in the other.

Cook cupped its chin,
studied its pupils for a New World distemper,
steered a white-stockinged leg shoreward,
saw three Aborigines look down to their tasks,
set at best the fifteenth foot in the whole world on the beach. 

John Lindley

She had Elizabeth Taylor's eyes;
not literally, of course,
although it might as well have been,
so convincing was the theft –
plucked as they were from Cat on a hot tin roof.

She was aware of the fact:
showed them off to best effect;
wore no glasses in public though she needed them;
looked others straight in the ordinary eye when she spoke.

"There go Elizabeth Taylor's eyes"
people would say,
for the rest of her face was unremarkable.

"I am two years older"
she would say.
"Elizabeth Taylor has my eyes
if you want the absolute truth."

Few people did,
or do.

John Lindley

Her memory was a box of Lucifers,
every devil-may-care suitor
a marriage of wood and sulphur
who flared briefly, cindered
and coiled into uselessness.

She was taciturn
but loose-lipped when pushed;
had just one real re-strikable
match head of a lover
when she was forty;
bragged him out of all proportion.

She grew old before his time;
trailed pale forearms,
laddered with veins,
in the washbowl.
Wrung her foxed hands
in the water,
remembering old flames.

John Lindley

My song began in the sand and brine
    of a slow retreating sea
when I crawled to shore and I stood upright
    and the light poured down on me
and my work began in the bones and flint
    of the tools I made my own
and mine is the song of time itself
    and mine is the song of stone.

My limbs were forged in the blazing sun 
    and my eyes were lit by fire
and my voice rang out in the razor wind
    and that wind became my choir.
My fingers turned to rivers and roads
    and my choir became a mass
and mine is the song of iron and bronze
    and mine is the song of glass.

My head dreamt a word for a place of work
    and my lips formed ‘factory’
and my blood was the oil of a thousand cogs
    that turned the machinery
and my voice is heard in the whispered words
    of the microchip and plough
and mine is the song of days long gone
    and mine is the song of now.

My pulse is the locomotive chant 
    of a heart that beats in Crewe.
My skin is a skein of cotton and silk
    from a life that Macclesfield knew.
My speech is the salt on Winsford’s tongue
    and my throat is a quarry of sand. 
I’m the splintering sound of a Tudor beam
    in the palm of Chester’s hand.

That sound remains in the Cheshire plains
    as the light of evening dies
and it echoes in the dish of Jodrell Bank
    and goes out to the Cheshire skies.
It flows through The Dee to Connah’s Quay
    to the sea that I came from
and mine is the song of here and gone
    and mine is the song to come.

John Lindley

Commissioned by Cheshire County Council for the  ‘Revealing Cheshire’s Past’ exhibition

But how did they measure it?
Did a wolf spider’s menu
step onto the scales leg by leg;
a gorged tarantula
open its belly in a laboratory
to reveal its daily consumption?
Did they multiply a figure by ants per acre
and tot it up into square miles of countries?
Was allowance made for the corrugation
of landscape in their calculations
where termite hills pock the plains like blisters?
Were arachnids interviewed, either
through some coded tapping of claws
or some elaborate dance of thorax and jaws?
Did they head count the mummified flies
glued onto trembling webs
and check out the vacancies in hives?
And was it all the spiders in the world
or just one - and if it was just one
why has it never appeared
on the Oprah Winfrey Show?

John Lindley