poet laureate of the peak - Mark Goodwin

Moor on Paper Under Foot

map tight in its Ortlieb
droplets spattered like miniature magnifying glasses
trembling water-domes bending print on paper

the big blue 81 northing
the loops of its eight threaded through by the thick orange 350 contour
and just above this northing’s eight
in an old-englishy script is the letter m
ending field system

a blanket of ground bordered so contained
by the big A625 & thin brown B6251
Owler Tor
a Red Bull can stuffed in a crack
a crisp packet full of rain
pick it up it drips see-through snack

National Trust
FB
weir
MP
spot-height 301
green dashes stitched close
to Burbage Brook’s blue silk filament
double-arrow pines
green wash
neat-printed lobed bulbs signifying trees
that lose their leaves when Persephone goes back below

CRoW Act access-arrows bristle-cluttered
like purple shark’s teeth

screwed to grit a bronze Longshaw Estate plaque
dented by stones having been smashed into it
but its bent damage now belongs
matches some gritty Vandal & Goth romance

drinking hot red current in Mother Cap’s
eastern lee as hail wasps past
white pellets gather in ground’s creases
lace-frilling horizontal corners formed between
gritstone & moorgrass

massive purple cloths of storm-scenery pulled on wind
sun-blur foundering in depths of late afternoon
a cluster of high cloud-edges scrolled in silver
slowly erased by red-grey-blue chiffon

the place boulderers call The Secret Garden
full of hand-hold fruits & blooms for feet
all eroded from compacted particles
washed down from what was aeons later named Scotland

a playing place with cream black-striped filaments of birch
trembling as a fabric of weathers directs their performing

Burbage Rocks is gun-metal-pastel smudged
under winter’s finger
(think of summer’s touch
climbing a crisp focus on intricately written architecture)

the A625 purple on paper dog-legged between
Toad’s Mouth & Burbage Bridge
a rain-glossed asphalt sliding headlights amongst
twilit heathery grit textures
a conduit for pods holding humans insulated from world by revolving rubber

Hathersage Moor
sheepfold
rain gauge
cairns
spot-height 384
Winyards Nick

Over Owler Tor’s wet crepuscular rocks
a congregation of fossilised birds perched on forever
whilst below owlstone grit the big bibles of Millstone’s walls
unseen from here but felt as an inevitable sudden dropping
imagine the heather as a roarin’ o’ waves
tumblin’ o’er a world’s end

just below the big blue northing 82 up around the 400 contour
looking up at The Rasp, E2 5b, on Higgar Tor’s leaning rock-god-brow
thou shalt not engrave
strands of rain dripping sideways
heart a millstone suddenly molten
December algae glowing greasily
the impulse to climb here a sullen lust
falling from throat to intestines
through thighs to stuck-still feet

sudden shush as wind stops on passing below
the 350 contour between Carl Wark & Burbage Brook
pines softly watchful through falling light

brush skin across slick transparent mapcase
smear wet over smooth
for rough ground loud under Vibram soles
body nude just under a border of Gore-Tex

between weather’s directions a being
beneath its own thumb on paper
maybe intrinsically involved with else’s where

two grouse gurgle round ground’s ear

Mark Goodwin

© Mark Goodwin

Mark Goodwin's first full-length collection will be published by Shearsman Books in May 2008. For further details click here.
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