Scan

            Philip Gross

So often the knitting and the unravelling 
can look much the same. 
These intrications 
could be how water thinks a country, 
                        headwaters to sea, 
                                           how rain 
speaks to a continent and land replies: 

a gush or a seep, a flood breaking its banks, 
the muddy wallow of an oxbow 
like the lost thread 
of a sentence that mislaid its syntax, its flow 
                        and itself – no towns, no 
                                             borders, no us 
except as a shadow, a damming, a constriction 

of a vein.  It could be how ice calls out to ice, 
how frost grows floral curlicues,
or could be thread veins 
in the skin, one’s age confessing something, 
                        the rust-and-fraying of 
                                              the wiring of within, 
their glyphs like the whip-twitch of bloodworms

in a puddle, stilled, script we can only guess 
means damage; a windscreen
shattering,
slow-motion, how it gives, goes ice-opaque, 
                        how it holds,  just enough,  
                                     … or the safety net
of mycelium web spread for the stumbling, 

the spent, thrust of the trees, the woods’ decay 
and fall caught, broken down, 
made new.
It could be how synapses speak, the dispassionate 
                        flicker we call thought, plan.
                                                passion, act, 
this whirring exchange, these conversations in us 

and around us, that are us, sometimes faltering 
but always reaching 
for repair 

around this clot of darkness, that cloud on the scan.

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Philip Gross’s The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, 2022) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, which he won in 2009. He is a keen collaborator, most recently with artist Valerie Coffin Price and Welsh-language poet Cyril Jones on Troeon/Turnings (Seren, 2021). With roots in Cornwall and Estonia, he lives in South Wales.