the crown and necklace of its jaws and teeth

all spearing into the nape of my neck.

I dropped the hunting knife and the shooting stick.

The rest of the group had moved on ahead.

The blades and feathers of grasses and ferns

conducted something in the air, but time

was static, jammed shut. Nerves strained with the sense

of a trap half-sprung, a pin almost pulled,

and all noise was a tight thread stretched and thinned

to breaking point and blood in its circuit

awaited a pulse. The turnpike of a branch

bent slowly back to shape across the trail.

Up high, a treetop craned its weather vane;

a storm-cloud split and it started to rain.

I was shouldered home in the fibreglass tomb

of a yellow canoe. Then sat up straight—

alive. Unharmed, in fact. In fact untouched.

I’ve heard it said that a human face

shaved in the hairs on the back of a head

can stop a jaguar dead in its tracks,

the way a tattoo of Christ, crucified

across the shoulder blades and down the spine,

in past times, could save a thief from the lash.

Years on, nothing has changed. I’m still the man

to be hauled down, ripped apart, but a sharp

backward glance, as it were, is all it takes.

I sense it mostly in the day-to-day:

not handling some rare gem or art object

but flicking hot fat over a bubbling egg,

test-flying a stunt-kite from Blackstone Edge,

not swearing to tell the whole truth on oath

but bending to read the meter with a torch,

tonguing the seamless flux of a gold tooth,

not shaking the hands of serial killers

but dead-heading dogwood with secateurs,

eyeballing blue tits through binoculars,

not crossing the great ocean by pedalo

but moseying forward in the middle lane,

hanging wallpaper flush to the plumb-line,

not barrelling over sky-high waterfalls

but brass-rubbing the hallmarks of fob-watches,

lying on top of sex, in the afterwards,

not metal-detecting the beach for land-mines

but tilting the fins of pinball machines,

pencilling snidey comments in the margins,

not escaping into freedom or peacetime

but trousering readies extruded from cashpoints,

eating the thick air that blasts the escarpment,

not rising to the bait of a fur coat

but yacking on the cordless, cruising Ceefax,

checking the pollen-count and long-range forecast,

not whipping up the mother-of-all soufflés

but picking off clay pipes with an air-rifle

at the side-show, describing myself as

white in the tick-box, dipping the dipstick,

needling pips from half a pomegranate,

not cranking up the system to overload

but licking the Christian Aid envelope,

lining up a family photograph,

not chasing twisters across Oklahoma

but changing a flat tyre on the hard shoulder,

dousing for C4 with a coat hanger,

not carving a slice from the Golden Calf

but hiking the town’s municipal golf course,

drowning an inner tube in a horse trough,

not feeling the sonic boom bodily

but swiping a key card in the hotel lobby,