Today



Today

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by Anhedral

Today

Awake at five

A raucous throstle at the pane,

My mate's tail tickling my heel.

"Up," she bids me, bright and bonny. "Coffee, then the road by six,

Before the tourist traffic stirs."

Shuffling, grumbling, down the stairs

Groping for the beans

I watch the brew drip through, and dream, and dream

That perhaps, some day, one day,

My mate, she'll finally deign to bite me.

[pic]

Today

Together

Top-down under solstice sun,

We take the Perthshire road.

By eight the heat is roiling, and the whole world amplifies.

A chaffinch shouts full song from ashes overhead. As we doppler past,

I just catch his dappled flash of green and blue.

Heady, swirling reek of garlic-in-the-hedge. Far ahead, unseen,

Some driver's killing lungs with tar and nicotine.

My mate's muzzle wrinkles.

All Bredalbane shimmers in the fey midmorning haze.

Madcap bikers wasp their deathwish dodgem games.

Ahead, a headlamp-flash; and there, around the bend,

A rider who misjudged his speed sits propped upon the verge,

His machine a smoking ruin.

Police and paramedics fuss; strobes light the churned earth orange and bright blue.

I try hard not to look.

For small distraction, I turn the dial.

A scientist picks tunes, and muses on free will.

A stretch of three-and-fifty summers, my length of road thus far

I tap my fuel-gauge, my meter for the road ahead;

The needle dips and quivers,

Ever the unreliable narrator.

My mate, she always knows just how to lift my mood.

She guffaws, and I glance to where her furry finger points.

A hotel sign shouts, 'Pets Welcome / Live Music'.

"Well," she giggles to me, grinning. "A discerning audience they would be, for sure."

But my mate, for all her lupine grace, still brings the guile.

Our destination's known to her and her alone.

[pic]

Moredun's a little fort upon a hill, girt all around by woodlands wild.

My mate – she brings the wild.

"So, why Moredun?" I ask, at journey's end.

She quirks a fang, and slips without a word

Along our sylvan way.

The woodland reeks and teems, the air scent-saturated

The cinnamon of gorse

Something rotting, fetid, in the loam.

Breezeless beech-boughs arch and beckon overhead

The oaks drip sphagnum, polypod.

Suddenly I'm seeing everything, and it's dizzying.

I pick out digitalis, forget-me-not, happy to retain botany

And see bumblebees make proper obeisance to thyme.

Some errant brock has left a turd; it's occluded, now

By shining, shit-drunk flies.

Brave beetles scuttle on thin stalks,

Urgent, iridescent, in thrall to some uncan prompting.

Lemon hawkweeds blaze, a thousand perfect suns

Ox-eyes supernova in their moment of fain glory.

Old needles prop a gleam of ruined cream

The ovoid's rent, the ragged edge of ruin;

No feathered creature issued thence.

Nearby, atop his throne of spruce

A raven cronk-cronks out a rude greeting

He bobs as if to moon me, earthbound as I am.

The brazen bill is clean of yolk, but he's proudly culpable, even still.

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My mate is smiling, waiting.

"Look," she says then, pointing. "Did you forget I said,

We never really left?"

A wolf-trace, perfect and pristine

Fresh as fondest memory

Is pressed into the mud.

The fort itself has smooth, sleek shoulders

A grassy pap, pregnant with life's chances.

We scramble up, you sprinting faster on swift legs;

When at last I breach the top, your muzzle's tilted up.

Your howl envelops me, and I sense none else can hear

And thus cocooned, I feel my vision swim.

All Perthshire blurs – and there, instead,

Full fourscore furclad wolves and men, from when they shared this world.

Your arms come round me from behind.

"Behold, your witnesses," she mouths into my ear.

"For on the eve of Litha, the hingepin of the year, all veils thin."

Your tongue's a lover's rasp across my neck.

I cant it back to meet your fang,

Blissfully undone.

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