Derek Wright: ‘Codling Moth’ and ‘T.V. Man’

Codling Moth

In the old country, in the other century,
they used to daub apple and pear tree trunks
with treated tar distilled into oil,

their bases wrapped in hessian on which the gunk
treacled down in a slick, a gloop of gold-brown
syrup on black web and bark—to no avail.

Once in the tree it would never be gone:
eggs hatched on leaves, caterpillars tunnelled the fruit;
half the delicious were golden, the others dun.

Here and now, above the possums’ scratches and scats,
Carbaryl’s getting the worm in its guts
but when you spray it’s either too soon or late

and mine are big ones, multifoliate.
Tending a fruit tree is like standing sentry
over young kids, dogs or poems that won’t come right.

They get love by the bushel, windfalls of patience,
but no defence. The corruption’s root to branch. Both
the kids and dogs come good, given half a chance,

but the tree will fail, not from bird and possum bites,
nor the poem from any outside thing. Their behemoth
is fifth column, a sign something’s wrong within.

Derek Wright

T.V. Man

He’d wheel the ageing monster from its nook,
rip the plastic hump from its back,
and it would look like what came out of it.
Transistors’ tiny ambulances cut

through massacres of screw and solder,
a bombed-out city with its roof torn off,
rust dripping from tube and wire,
anagrammed body parts and stuff.

Back then you could still, like primitives, delve
after the lightning in the machine,
the soul-sucking rays that let themselves in
when you dozed off in front of it at twelve.

More than our crouching idiot-selves
there had to be in that one-eyed glaze
which never seemed to leave your face,
that torture-shop racked with s and valves.

We sit up straight at the wall-screen, look around,
along. If we believe what comes from it now,
it snoops, listens; in corners of its bland surround
files away our data yet is still somehow

a less secretive, sinister presence
than that old zombified fluorescence
and its midnight curfew dot, vanishing
with the hunchbacked business of watching.

Derek Wright