Two Poems by Matt Howard

Tench

Stiff as a tongue with its nerve cut,
that tench surfaced, dead. From the clay bottom,
up past my untroubled night float,

it lapped with the dawn from the reed
to the pit’s tapered end. I banked it.
The deepest green with blunt, black fins,

a slimey, muscled body, all rigored.
Full of the life that was and wasn’t in it.
My child hands were slicked with the mucus

and while other fish were still out there rolling
there was no flinch or show of healing, just as here,
thirty years on there’s nothing to be done

for the strongest men, dear to me, gone and going –
the something speaking then that laps again now
these dawns that can’t be answered or thrown back.

St Mark’s Flies

I’d show you, if you let me,
come the hawthorn,
around some field or wood edge,

deep time hovering,
undiminished
by the name of any saint’s day.

Their all-legs, slung-back
dangle, resolving in a strain
to nectar in that thick scent,

all that flower opening.
How a male settles to it –
head thick with what I want

to say is sagittal, that crest,
and the will of the mouth
feasting.

They are daemons fed-on-rot
in their fizzing cosmic black.
Familiars of the soil, they are

their own evangelists
bursting for the day and each
a clinker of our whole wild scenario.

Matt Howard lives in Norwich, where he works for the RSPB. His first full collection, Gall, was published by The Rialto in 2018 and was winner of the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize in 2019 and won Best First Collection in the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020.