Carol Watts

HELIANTHUS HILL

I

the hill was bending up stormy
periscopic fields turning to catch
the last light, yellow millenarian

suns phalanxed into late time
all moving tropical, humanoid 
& broad as if deceit had gone

to ground, brought forth &
mustering blind, bailed out in
summer waiting, fullface

speech twisting a way out of
mouthless armories, ranked
in furrows, where legs might

bud in sightless harmonizing
marching on the spot, this
heliocratic wheel, massed

against the rain, cicadas
tuning up on old response
patterns, basal outgroups.

II

plant memory runs abroad
drumming in, earlier summers
toying with planetary

vantage, the tension of backward
motion, where scotomas are
golden platefuls, that common

weal. We were all under the sun,
settled & instamatic, craning
to revisit that sovereign gilt, so

many pigs fattened with flat
pennies, leveraged out with
knives, stored up for harvest

& fullness of recompense.
Golden past, orient immortal
sunflower. Thick stumped

gait, make a run for the wire.
Spread your wideness of time,
your butter honest hours.

III

what were those spread battalions, hived
in tricked out kernels, the darkening
ripeness. Heavier heads would keep

your coins on the hop, popping &
bloating in the heat are so many sweet
clouds to chew on. Pricked in present

topical, detonations in ray florets
moving east to west. The height was
always estimate, drawn up to adult

measure, or thin whiplash in a can. Now
you are doused in shades, come massing
at nightfall, hearing the click of gold in

teeth, or grinding of tares at mill
& feed, while tallness suggests
breeding, some elegance of wants

& fruitful pericarp, here a full platter
with its magnetic grains, ready to
flip us above the substrate.

IV

only testify, that’s in their congregation
where fields come to rot, turn to rust
& solar senility, the brackishness of

time thirsting on blackened stems. See
so many heads bent at sunset, where
shame rises, no holding of this gaze

but the erection, the right to bear it
already mouldering. With the morning
all heads turn in concert, nape of

mechanical dawn. The richness of
sovereign life, would be this light,
its brutal concord. Heads sustaining

so much attention, noise of holding
true to arms. Blaze of golden mean,
spiraling to husks, the rustle of smaller

rodent economies, or trampling of boar.
At feet, root. Riding solar shotgun,
held by the neck this shadowless day.

 

© Carol Watts

Carol Watts' work includes Wrack (2007) and Occasionals (2011), both from Reality Street , and a number of chapbooks, including the When Blue Light Falls series, from Oystercatcher, and most recently the Equipage pamphlet Mother Blake. Her work across media includes an ongoing collaboration with sound artist Will Montgomery, which began with Pitch in 2011: http://delirioushem.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/pitch.html. Her collection Sundog is forthcoming from Veer Books in 2013. She directs the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck, University of London.