Akela

by Graham Burchell

had us in her nesting box
one evening every week:
creosote wood haven
in a rustic island
off The Ridgeway.

She had us filed in sixes,
half dozens in green plumage,
wool and skullcaps slipping
over Brylcreem-short back and
sides. Arms stitched with badges.

This weekday evening goddess
had us raising two stiff fingers,
tilted like pistol barrels at our heads.

Had us chanting dib dib dob
without coercion or torture.
Made us wear scarves pulled
like a noose to a woggle of

leather. Akela with the beak
of an owl: brown owl Akela
woman; our smiling Anubis
from a jungle book of tame
names and innocence.

Akela thin as a winter alder
with a mossed-up trunk.   
The knot expert, almost without
sex, yet warm as fresh-boiled milk.

________________
First published in Four Volts

Christine

by Graham Burchell

grass eyes

a smile born
of earth’s own
sex drive

gold hair
brushed the ridges
of her shoulders

every day
a Christmas
for Christine

in the warmer season
with more skin to show
than summer fabric

her nubility
vibrated louder
than her laugh

shock waves thrummed
through the green patch
beneath our deck chairs

where in
deepest sag of canvas
we harboured secrets

louder her shapeliness sang
than tennis balls
thumping

or sweated cries
and stretched limbs
on the courts before us

Christine, tease
of the tennis club,
we were never sure

if you knew your power
when the lights went on
in your grass eyes

when teeth
were offered as gates
to hold back your pink tongue

when you snatched grass
like hair torn from a scalp
and approached

to thrust it deep
into the trousers
of a chosen one

________________
First published in Contemporary American Voices

Shroud

by Graham Burchell

When she passed away
I left our house
untouched
crumbs staled
cats went unfed
curtains held back
the light

When I returned
the impression of her
remained
the weight of
pregnant torso
pressed deep
in the top sheet
deep whirlpool of hips
small indentation
of head

where stone-faced
ambulancemen
had laid her
lifting her
from foetal curl
beside our bed

air was colder
just her curves
sculpted in linen
and a searing memory
of death there
a great pink dome
of our unborn child
piled high

the bed
had become a shrine
the sheet
my Shroud of Turin
that I would not touch
or wash

________________
First published in Houston Literary Review

The Kiss
(After Frida Kahlo)

by Graham Burchell

Three photos snatched of Frida
and her onion-waist husband

in the first I see delicacy
she is far too thin   a rod

I am reminded of the bus she rode
that broke   that broke her back

a year later she is snapped
at the Golden Gate Bridge   proud

confident   hair glistening
head erect   hands on hips

and then the third   mi elección
my nonpareil   a stolen moment

a nimble lens to snatch a kiss
upon a scaffold in Detroit

in this captured beat
she is that quiet energy

in a brook   a given angel 
swan-neck reaching to trust

for a moment of love and pride
planted on the lips on the face

of her onion-waist man
for his art and far-reaching fame

some tenderness   snapped
amid the layers of pain

________________
First published in Le Fenetre

A Positive Cuckoo
(For Jane Weir)

by Graham Burchell

I write resisting any temptation
to add a letter d or question the
Italian in your name or voice as
northern English as hot pot and black pudding

your little book of words came at me
without asking  arriving in my black
mailbox on a stick on a distant lawn
the sound of you sealed in a compact disc

the cover of “Alice” your second book
has furrows and stitching on a purple
lapel and a clean taut belt at the back
a touch-me texture to suck me into

my gabardine childhood of
raw short trouser days in Kentish winters
when fair-haired I would have recognized
myself running in fog to Riber

and when I heard that Coronation Street
stone wall accent read to me like flat rain
on a sheep’s back in Derbyshire drizzling
out of the ghost belly of speakers

in my study in Texas I smiled
and I turned to the back flap’s inch square
image of you so suited to a Roman stola
yet saw the paleness   the impoverished light

I understood that self-description
of how you regarded you as a
positive cuckoo   an Anglo-Italian
hybridised under differing British rain

Dream of a Lunch With Carolyn
For Carolyn Forché

by Graham Burchell

A damp glass of ice tea with lemon sits. Sunshine sifts through transparent clouds of cinnamon and French fry. A droplet of condensation traces a spiritless vein on the back of her hand. I try not to stare or cough up a comment about how we share nineteen fifty as our birth year. I just want to swap words in Spanish, compare her El Salvador with my Mexico and Chile. I half expect her to produce an ear from her purse, a leather souvenir blackened with age, once stolen like severed hands and heads in the east. “Here, I saved one so you may validate my poem, ‘The Colonel’.” This I could let rest between the salt and Cholula hot sauce to catch our conversation: ear to the wiped table.