Beaver’s Pick
Judith Taylor

Photo Credit: ashley.adcox/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

Cycle

The body adapts to dearth.
Starve it of food and it will struggle on
consuming itself, as long as self remains to it.
Starve it of sleep, and it tries
—good body—to please you

adapts to papery eyelids, sugar cravings;
that feeling of running hot, as if your skull
has become a light source and you can’t switch off;
that tendency to weep.
It only needs a little training

—staying up late, rewriting lists
from all you haven’t achieved today
into what you’ll achieve tomorrow;
or scrolling down your phone screen
for a change of news—

and the body will take what’s given it
for the new normal: wake you
after two or three hours, as if
it’s had enough; and never allow itself
to dive down into the deep waves

between your frittering dreams, as if it’s fearful
it might never regain the surface.
You can teach yourself to be
terrifyingly, constantly alert this way.
People do. Not just in wars:

there’s a kind of politician who boasts
in their memoirs, of their appetite
for the tough task; of their iron will.
How they trained themselves to exist on
two or three hours of sleep. And nobody

cuts in to say the obvious:
that living like that will make you sick
in the end, will make you
borderline mad. Like us, in bodies we force
to stay awake beyond endurance

afraid of what’s being done, that we’ll have
to surface to. Another day
to scroll down through, our eyes dry
and painful. Another list. A bad dream
we are too lit up to wake from.

Daughter

In the dream, he says get out of here
and don’t come back. I think it’s a joke:
he likes to do the stern Victorian patriarch.

It’s an act, he says
—confronting us with our own bourgeois morality
for our own good, since we’re too weak in the head
to be led on rational lines.

I play along
but I think about that business with the earrings
and that he’s a hypocrite too. Oh
that teenage word!
—but who can you use it on if not your father?

In the background,
in the dream, my mother frowns. She knows this game
is going to make me late in leaving
and she’s seen too much, all these years,
to find it funny now.

It’s only once I’m awake I realise
that I called her up about as grey as she is now,
and as cynical. My father, though
I must have dreamed at least a decade younger.

Still arguing, for the sake of it, still maintaining
black was white, too, if he thought it likely
someone would answer back
and give him a chance to overbear them. Not

in the slightest doubt of himself.
Not hesitant
yet. Not fragile.

Judith Taylor comes from Perthshire, in eastern central Scotland, and now lives and works in Aberdeen, where she is one of the organisers of the monthly “Poetry at Books and Beans” events. Her first full-length collection, Not in Nightingale Country, was published in 2017 by Red Squirrel Press, and she is one of the Editors of Poetry Scotland magazine. Email: j.taylor.09[at]btinternet.com