It is hard to say when it started, all that running,
stopping, bending and moving of bodies
from cracks full of congealed rain. Perhaps around
the time we learned you were not coming back.
Or when the eucalyptus tree fell; an oracle for all
the world’s injuries. Perhaps last night, along the flow
of springs, or only this morning, beside spasmodic
tides in the school run, against the screeching
of witches on tricycles, or perhaps seagulls.
And if the folly of rescuing trees and worms
could rescue others, best to hold fast to the moving
handrail and look in the direction of travel,
when on liminal pathways, across lay lines,
where rooks giddy with flight settle to charcoal
smudges, or perhaps down trails you can never
catch up with the others, no matter how fast
you think you walk.
For the saving of worms is a simple thing
in the space between complications,
between labia of turf where men dream
of their divine membership to a mechanical
virgin’s body and analyse strategic
land expansions, as if they were boxing
matches, or football.
And though I know that the saving of worms
will not bring back the dead, and did not save
the dying, such quaking in my bones keep
saying that even one be rescued, so as to be,
in a future life, a recording demon, or perhaps
a vampire scribe.
And in the end, soon in a city full of antlers,
of wild things chalked up on walls, ghost dogs
across the gates, calls full of exclamation marks,
what else was left for me to do, but to dream
of you reclining, still alive, remote, and all
the years between us, retreating, like hands
opening to let water, or perhaps rice, or salt, fall.
Born in Florence, Francesca La Nave studied science and did field research in prehistory in her native Italy and in the African Sahara. She studied Art at Chelsea School of Art, held a studio at Cable Street Studios, and was awarded Artist in Residence at the Homerton Hospital Art Therapy Department in the late 1980s, and later worked as an Art Psychotherapist and Group Analytic Psychotherapist with several published papers. She is an artist working across painting, printmaking, and is a winner at the 2025 Miniprint International Cadaques. She is a poet, published in anthologies, magazines and long listed by Fish-Publishing and Mslexia. Her work elaborates themes of dreams and dream-like states, drawing from landscapes in external and internal journeys.
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