Two Poems

Ecologic

What are those glassine circles? Lunaria? Wafer,
glissade, waft? Is to name a thing to take its Latinate and translate
backwards? Components, sheen and mother-
lustre, an ideal array of pills to go down, smiling. Bluebells

like funnels, they too surrender in sleep, disclosing …
An oyster changes, dreamlike in its water, female, male, back again,
horde of them tonguing pearls off some sound. The child
on lithium (don’t see) will see in shadow all animals.

Milk Music

After The Compleat Housewife by Eliza Smith, 1727

Take of white tansy (Is this tansy?) and drop into the eyes
now and then, for a palliative. Dedicate a day to making medicine.
To make a confection, use the day’s imagination. To make
amber jam, meringue, lozenges, bear the terrible cauldron.
To make dull wine taste complex, try this experiment. Use liquorice
to fend off lice and illness. Ignore mild offence or violence.
To make bride pie, to make pasties to fry, olio or little
cracknels, work. Use salt to preserve the bird.
To make a dense syrup, lemon cordial, fever water, spirits
from green walnut or fig, forage. To stop a fit? Make a dropsy.
To make ink from, to prevent its ruin, mind. To cure a child
of its instincts, make regular the derangements.
To make of nebulous iron, draw forth. Let lull and syntax
of Wife preside. Procure an ounce of silver. Do not
frighten or overwhelm her. Be enthusiastic in all endeavour.
To make restorative jelly, ask no favour. The noise of leaning back
in delight? For that, I apologise. The business to make and keep gentle
is of a mother and father. Become a sort of lilac person,
soft-spoken, disappointed. Propulse if you wish. Make of music
a cloak, affirmed by muscles of surreal spring wood.