Noonday gorsebloom
walking the working dogs as an excuse

to spend the afternoon skinny dipping

in a slow braid of the river its radiant summer-snowmelt blue

a delicious chill that stops her breath a little 
the water so clean it thrives with wriggling nymphs

stoneflies and caddis larvae and the farmer’s daughter

basking in the sweat of the glacier her new limbs a half-submerged star

staring back to the sky and spitting a fountain from chapped lips 
the crop-dusting plane overhead an off-white whine through distant ozone

while the huntaways have gone off after riverbed rabbits

and the willows and gorse all sizzle with cicadas

and pollinators and crisping seedheads until all the valley’s music turns
muted and bluish thrummed over by her own insistent heartbeat

when she sinks to walk her hands along the riverbed

all her low sunken mounds stirring sediment

her body a sunken ship crowded with desperate ancestors
her wreckage draped with sun-slung nets of caustic light

her hair swept about like a halo of gilded didymo

a gleaming naiad moment ruptured by the pack of dogs

plunging in to save the mistress they see drowning
scrabbling blithe claws that raise ruddy

welts on her softened skin their clumsy strokes

crosshatching homemade scars the numbness

of cold giving way to streaks of hot lightning 
and she cannot explain to the dogs the concept of held breath

their open mouths panting in her face

fragranced with sampled sheep shit and carrion

but the only way to get out of the mongrels’ frenzy is to swim 
to the shore and sit with them shivering as they

shake off their pride in salvation

so she’s soaked in stinging stinking dog-water

slapping her legs instead of the sandflies 
although the flighty vampires suckling so obscenely

are the only creatures that really belong in this scene

not the dogs or the willows or the girl

or the gorse with its raptures of yellow
that invasive stellation annexing the slopes

to wrestle black beech at the bush boundary

the smells of pollinated combat mingling by the water

sultry as marzipan and honeydew casting a heady spell 
over the colonised valley the weeds like her very presence here

a legacy of other people’s blood and money

though she has yet to understand this history is her own

still finding a place in her bones let alone the land 
this scenery just the dappled background where she tried to leave

the body that dragged her back

and back to the world of growing things

with its own ferocious motives
still hardy like her brute inheritance that ancestral flower

named furze or whin or ulex or bloody goddamned gorse

she can be cut back and burned and still put up her tender shoots

her millions of gilded petals her seedpods cracking
shotgun blasts of life like joyous profanities

like defiant blessings like

what is this world I’m blooming into

and how might I destroy it