Here’s the poem. I’ve added notes. Hover over each underlined line to see how I arrived there. As a collage poem set as an exercise it ended up addressing – somewhat obliquely – the issues I was avoiding. The title didn’t come until later – and I arrived at it quite randomly – even if I did write ‘Note: you can’t create successful randomness’ in my lecture notes at Arvon. I think randomness occurs by accident, so the less you focus on the thing that’s blocking you the more likely you are to reach it.

The Weather in the Womb

Upstairs in a room facing north
a summer
       marries immediately.
Our job was to get her to drink.
It took a seismic shift to get changed
        after dinner.

Autumn is head down in the sink.
The trees taste iron and wren
       droppings.
Oh my rustic plectrum!
Your music is
       where the leaf falls.
             Where it
                      falls
the river hums like a PC.

       Take note
of the ice on the water trough in the yard
and the Eskimo oil from deep sea fish
       caught by a bear
whose coat is a lichen of silver tipped hair
fuzzy as alkanet.

There is a God
       and he dwells in the perfect
horse dung on the bridle path.

Evening is the hardest skin we carry.