Powehi The Hill Farmer is Spirited Away Mark-stepper

Powehi

CRAIG DOBSON

Craig Dobson’s fiction and poetry were published in The London Magazine, The Rialto, The Literary Hatchet, THINK, Better Than Starbucks, The Dark Horse, Poetry Salzburg Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Ekphrastic Review and Active Muse, North, Stand, Prole, Butcher’s Dog, Magma and The Poetry Daily website. He lives and works in the UK. The supermassive black hole at the core of the supergiant elliptical galaxy M87

They’ve seen one, now. A meaninglessness of zeros across its godawful maw – that vast, doughnut-shaped plughole which absolutely nothing – let alone your curious bait – can escape, when it’s too late to realise that it’s you who’s caught, you who’s tied to the doom chord, the umbilicus of void reeling your hopelessness in towards wonder’s unglinting hook lodged right in the mirroring trap from which you cannot even begin to fathom the shout that couldn’t even begin to fathom squeaking its way back out – and, even if it could, all that it would say was that you were traceless history, not even a thought fossil, not even the dead light of your hope’s star, let alone the great scientific fisherman you’d once dreamed could cast from imagination’s shore, beyond the border of information – and light, let’s not forget – among rich shoals of unknowing that swarm the dim horizon where your gravity now meets a far graver one, whose heart’s great backward loss pumps everything in, drains the very medium of being, robs a whole universe blind, morning, noon & night, punctures entirety with a dark hunger’s unending, stellar greed – barely even to be conceived, let alone weighed, in the unimaginable mass of its need.

The Hill Farmer is Spirited Away

CRAIG DOBSON

There are paths here, tracks I have known longer than any other thing. Orphaned in these hills, I grew to follow the herds. Penned only with them at lambing time, I’m the lamp carrier, the long man, a crooked figure striding the hairline ways.

Deaf to all but the wind’s worrying call, I never heard the spirit follow, its long stride the twin of mine, its laboured breath in time with my stone-sore bones and view-numbed mind. Not even the flock knew, their dagged and ragged fears as blind as mine to something neither rockfall nor hunting form. It caught me where you’d least expect – not at the high pass, or the tarn beneath The Old Boy’s Head, nor down the long straight way from the East Ridge to the West with nothing on one’s mind to keep such thoughts at bay.

No, it was just there, at the cattle grid, where a lost glove had been left on the footpath sign should its owner ever return. A wet, draggled thing, its once bright colours struggled their abandoned rainbow pattern in the dull, damp air of morning.

If they hadn’t been back for it yet, they never would, I thought.

And stood there then – a sudden half – the spirit inside me, echoing.

Mark-stepper

CRAIG DOBSON

Among a stillness of ferns and dead leaves, under cold boughs behind which, moonless and huge, skies pitch, I hear the river dark with old rain gathering.

A stir of shadows. Some rotting spoor. My footfall’s blunder rumoured on the water. Beyond the wood, mist-poured hedgerows drown.

Stumbled senses let slip a crouch of shade to rise in starveling light, stealing between the hushed trees as if, ahead, they gave up burning torches and hall-song

calling this shadowed hunger on. Sparing me those feast-licked walls and the blood-cry’s bold unbordering beneath a roof’s flicker of wings –

glimpsed through cold boughs barring a huge, moonless sky under which I spill over dead leaves, among a stillness of ferns and the dark river running.