Mark Waldron

Sixteen Found Dogs


As my friend Meredith used to say
before she got bit,

The grass is a dog in green costume, praying for release.
(Her words, not mine.)

Each of Meredith’s words is a dog –
you’d agree if you knew Meredith.

So that makes twelve dogs so far.

Three stones thrown at a fence go Arf, Arf, Arf –
that’s another three right there.

The ground is the last dog – if you throw
that dog a stick it will catch it every time.

Having pulled the stick down
to its enormous mouth

it will wait patiently
for you to throw the stick again. It will never tire.


*


Buddies


Sometimes I have wished my dong
were an impossible leviathan

that protruded, with a person’s girth
from my loins where we’d be

as conjoined twins conjoined.
It would rise to my head height,

so that I might, each morning
as I lay in bed, reach my arms around it,

hug it tight, pressed against my belly
and my chest, rest my cheek against

its helmet-sized helmet, and with my
eyes squeezed shut, hold it thus

so that we might buttress one another
against this world’s stuffy opprobrium.


*


Angry with Trees


What shameless cheats
the trees are.

How poker-faced with
their unbeatable

hands of identical cards,
an uncountable flush

thrown down on the baize
with an obnoxious flourish

just as each card
with its oft-repeated green

turns red and brown
and yellow and orange,

and the trees gather up
their winnings by sucking

the poor ordinary ground as
they get ready to play again.

Well fuck you, trees.
I never met a blasted tree

that didn’t have my taste
stuffed in its

wood mouth,
an ace in the hole.


*


Las Aves Vacías 


All the new birds
are made of nothing.

They have nothing inside
(for anti-ballast)

and those insides
are surrounded

in an outside nothing
which has its own

flibberti hole.
The birds,

they’re nothinging
up there

in the nothing trees,
or on nothing roofs

under a nothing sky.
They fly of course,

but what is flying
if not nothing?


*


Sweet, like Rinky-Dink


My sweet me is not like an igloo, not like a canoe
or a crocodile. No, she’s like a canoodle.

I love her so much, she is ding-dong-dishy, she is a song,
a song-ditty you can lick to the tip of.

I kiss her in a way that alludes to kissing.
I hug her in a way that refers to hugging.

I bite her in a way that references biting.
We fandangle in a way that connotes fandangling and so on.

Good heavens, we allude in a way that alludes to alluding,
but I suck my me as a leech might –

to get me off you’ll have to burn me with cigars.
You’ll have to lop my head off.
 

    13     I wish I loved lawnmowers
    15     Brute Creation
    16     Sixteen Found Dogs
    17     The Take-Off
    18     Las Aves Vacías
    19     Sarouk Mohajeran
    21     Your Face  
    22     Diving for Pearls
    23     Sweet, like Rinky-Dink
    24     The Stick
    25     Light that falls
    26     WW1 Marcie
    28     What are things  
    29     The body is a kind of home,  
    33     Hobnobbing with Elephants
    34     A Scabbarding
    35     Manno
    36     A Drip
    37     Oh no,
    38     Coming Through!
    39     Endpiece
    40     Supination
    41     How to Get a Gibbet through the Small Hole
    42     Poor light,
    43    Angry with Trees
    44     The Dragonfly and Berries
    46     My Hopeless Marcie
    47     Ice Cream for I Scream
    48     As Though Begat, but Not
    49     How scrubbed-up clean
    50     The first time I came upon him,
    52     How to Tap a Field Mushroom
    53     A Closed Sandwich
    54     The main event
    57     No wonder
    58     A Flying Visit
    59     Ordinary People, We Just Don’t See Them
    60     The Wild West
    61     Even now that we live exclusively
    63     What are you doing taking the air
    64     My God, my Marcie’s got
    65     My brain likes fish,
    66     My brain is a fool,
    67     My boneheaded brain
    69     The words you sweat,
    70     The Lighthouse Keeper
    72     Buddies
    73     Even when
    74     Trees, Breeze and Rabbits
    76     Childhood
 

‘Waldron’s poems are good at building a world, scaling out from close-ups of small objects to galactic constellations that absorb and skew their more recognizable scenes and references’. – John McAuliffe, The Poetry Review [on Meanwhile, Trees]

‘Mark Waldron’s Meanwhile, Trees surrounds the reader in a cyclonic blur of humour hiding a manic urge towards self-destruction.  The tone of these poems is deceptively light; glee edged with darkness is the main flavour of this book.’ – Bethany W. Pope, Magma

‘… nobody does a controlled explosion quite like Mark Waldron.  Under his inimitable eye events and emotions are slowed to a state of near-stasis, to be scrutinized, schematized, and dazzlingly animated.  Meanwhile, Trees, his third collection, presents a rich emulsion of languor and anxiety that I found riotously enjoyable.’ – Abigail Parry, Poetry London 

‘This quite astonishing collection should certainly be placed in the library, but carefully, with the most quizzical, ironical and independently-minded of older students directed towards it with glee: they will never have read anything quite like it before.’ – Frank Startup, The School Librarian [on Meanwhile, Trees]