Sebastian Schloessingk: Two Poems

Cow Motif

A full udder thwacking (when the cow

runs for real) up against each cowside

in turn, loud as a beaten carpet.

Around a field gate, sometimes deep semi­-

circular ripples, stormforce dried

mud waves: a minor mystery to set

beside corn circles. The motif

recurs in the frown ripples sculpted—

between and above cows’ wide-spaced eyes—

placid on the forehead. When not, but

coming at you, cows can be stopped dead

it’s claimed with a hard application by

thumb and forefinger pinchlocking

the nostrils, not easy mid-charge (though

something matadors might try under

the cover of a swirled cape). Unmoved

field bulls: the rough trade neck hump, but also

thighs elegant raised and rounded.

Overhang

A baby woken on arrival, from a deep

car sleep, was pronounced “out of sorts and trembling”.

She’s borne about at shoulder level, in the crook

of the arm, not only for (mutual) comfort but to be

at human communing level, parity of heads.

Her miniature laugh divides into tinkles more like

a dolphin’s picked-up electrical crackle. Carried

to another room, she turns her head to survey

and it seems cherish whatever she’s leaving,

the scene that has been her. Or clamps the breezy peak of

a baseball cap with all her fingers like an overhang.

“Cradle cap”, bogey-yellow: to skin it off, the favoured

instrument is a debit card. Babies look, some say,

like their dads at first, till Nature’s allayed Worry

on that score, can move on. And then mums, mums’ great

uncles etc … Among the shadows of the landing

bannister poles on the wall, a shadow. The smallest of

children can be stock-still (for the love figure) in wait.

Sebastian Schloessingk