Three Poems by Sarah Corbett

Tree (ii)

Small brown buds, some in clusters,
cloven, faun’s hooves. Tree a slow
dance in a separate dimension.
Reach and open, says the tree’s aura,

the sun is here. In the woods, someone
is shooting. The deer family appear
in the fields’ long grass. Remember
when you were small, son, and we saw

the faun sleeping in its basket of reeds?
The deer pause, ears tuned as forks.
If only I could sketch them, but they are
off in one bound, an exclamation.

Tree reaches skyward like a child
waving at a plane. I press my heart
outward to meet the tree’s albumen.
Time folds us into its field.

Tree (iv)

Full bodied now, tree has grown.
Sun rests, happiness on its canopy.
After the thunderstorm, leaves voice
notes into sung dimensions.

I draw an outline from several angles.
This way, tree leans towards me
blushing greenly; from the wall
it is skywards, aloof, an arabesque.

How far away you are, how close.
We FaceTime, your eyes looped
with tiredness, hair a mess. Still
on the kitchen doorpost, the marks

of your growth. If felled tree could
show each year’s correspondence.
As if hearing, tree reaches out –
a gasp in the throat, a loop of hope.

Tree (viii)

October begins in rain, the grass
in the garden sodden, leaves brown
spotted, yellow dropsied,
white clouds a heavy veil,

but now morning stuns the sky
and it falls apart, pieces of blue.
Tree hoards bees, flies, a bluebottle
sunning its wings, abdomen an opal.

Why do I feel like crying – a scent,
my neighbour’s laundry a mile away,
or this eucalyptus, out of its continent?
I walk the garden boundary sniffing.

After you leave, the violence
of the loss of you again. Tree is scented
with the incense of its being. Becomes
the centre, this censor teeming.

Sarah Corbett's fifth collection of poems, A Perfect Mirror, (Pavilion Poetry/Liverpool University Press, 2018), was Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prizes; she published the verse-novel, And She Was with Pavilion in 2015, and three previous collections with Seren Books. Her work has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes, and widely translated and anthologised. She won a Northern Writer's Award for Fiction in 2019 and is working on her second novel, and a new work in poetry, forthcoming from Pavilion in 2024. She lives in Hebden Bridge, where she will direct the first Sylvia Plath Literary Festival, taking place over 21-23 October 2022.