Danielle Hooke Goodbody
ABYSS OF THE BIRDS
Such little care, the song of evening. Dark sky of leaves
filtering rain into its second life, where the hated bird
still sings. This is the back of the synagogue, but it is not
the park where the memorial tree is planted.
In the tiny abyss of home, the ceilings bright white &
dry, a filtered south east window, strangled indirect
sun. Sat very still, the view in to & out of everything
obscured. Don’t come too near. The threat of war
come & gone, the muscle ache of immunity,
of the steering arm weak in forgotten trajectory.
The writing arm, as if ever at play. The hand not
holding the leash reaches down for a single green
feather, lost from the wing of a lost bird of Paradise.
& in the evening, the sun behind the house, it is safe
to raise the blind again. The North Sea at war
with the shore & the horizon
What little evil there is
Inspired by Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen.
SEPTEMBER
The Hunt
All the chords we hum come out from under the hunter’s fingers.
We, the knives of the village, a phrase of breeze forgotten
This book went all the way home & came all the way back
& once it was away again it spoke with the rage of trumpets
Knives of the village. Palms on shoulders aim us
at prey & the scope sings such a familiar song, the prey
comes on steady paws, on heavy hooves towards the cruel phrase
which simply sings in everything. This village of young knives
which raised a wolf the colour of the afterlife of oak leaves.
He wakes from the cave, hunter. Grown, he comes howling your chords
Inspired by The Seasons by Tchaikovsky
NOTES TOWARD A PRAIRIE EXPLORATION
Prayer, of course, to cross the prairie
When weaponised? well regulated
pr— air to keep & bear
prey
across the
pr— eyrie
shall not
re — pay [ ]
prise free [from] state
infringe[ ]
(is there still a clearing calm enough for such worn boots)
Prai —se
(in these late days, the sky is a staked claim)
This is my great dark field now. Somewhere in the churning harvest
hides a track to the lost cargo of the
horizon
funny thing is, I never wanted
to drive a train
Raise
the blind to paler waves, a colour that could only be crossed
by innocent feet. A home-recording of “Wildflowers”— who deserves
deepest cover? Think of the wheat that would grow on a ship of souls, as if
in that mellow gold there was not also the anxious orange
horizon
Windmills & limestone, born to be a paper boat
in the flooded quarry. Train track through big woods,
big woods at edge of remnant prairie. It was a horn the whole town
heard only in sleep, but one night one person was awake to watch
the train howl to a stop behind the White Hen, to see the engineer
climb back into the cab with a black coffee
& what clouds does the engine cut
before it comes home again
What hasn’t changed— the angry open spaces,
the garage & the factory town cover band, the empty bottle
& the way it longs for the brick wall
pr
ey
pr a yer
irie
Danielle Hooke Goodbody is originally from Chicago, but has lived in the UK since 2009. She is a PhD student at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Recent work appears in Golden Handcuffs Review and Molly Bloom.