Peter McDonald

The blood-bruise

I worked against it all that afternoon,
the racing bindweed, or convolvulus,
that had gone unchecked, it seemed, by anyone
for weeks, and now made its calamitous
faces everywhere: those deathly-delicate
trompettes, and their lime-white
mouths that opened up, and opened again,
in silent and proliferating forms
strung along cords I had to bundle down
and gather up as tangles in my arms.

I stooped in to the stricken rosebushes
where they had all but given up the ghost
so deeply had the bindweed's ropes and lashes
become involved, and so nearly had they lost
the plot to its inveigling flowers and leaves;
as thorns plucked at my sleeves
I hauled in slippery tendrils by the yard
until my arms could hold no more, my arms
that, now I looked, had been scrabbed and scarred
where they and the sharp roses came to terms.

What I saw then, when I saw you suddenly,
knocked me off-kilter, like a freak shot
or a punch from nowhere, making light of me:
it wasn't even your face at first, and not
your blue-green eyes as they took in my alarm,
but the blood-bruise on your arm
where the skin was softest; where, as I looked,
I almost tracked the course a vein might run
minutely under my fingers; where they unhooked
and undid you, when all of their work was done.

(from Pastorals, 2004)