A variation on the Völuspá: where gods animate the first humans

It began as a bad joke,
when Dvalin or Dain convinced
the simpleton brother
to trundle back a wheelbarrow full of clay
for the metal workers.
The dwarves hardly dabbled
In anything other than armour
and jewels, but they took
an odd liking to clay: the ease
in modelling, the glow
when you sinter it to a glaze.
 
After a while
the dwarves took the shapes out of the kiln
and named them.
Once they were cool and hard
on the stone floor,
as a dare,
one of them raised his chisel
and claimed that they
could ‘make these figures real’.
 
So they went for it,
the dark workshop lit like a night sky
under the sparks. They paused
as the sun came up, opened a blind,
and smirked at the sight of their craft.
 
But when spoken to
the things made no answer:
try as the dwarves might,
no matter how perfect
the curve of the eye, the motion sculpted
in the silhouette,
the creatures they’d intended
to flood with passions devouring as their own
kept quiet.
Who knows how long they’d been gathering rain there,
discarded by the ditch
where we found them.

SHE IS LEAVING
 
This is the world she grew up in.
It has yellow walls and strong doors
and outside is a copse of trees.
The sandy earth is carpeted 
with strawberries – their reds are flecked
as the iris is flecked. There is
moss here tumbling from the leaden
roof an evolution faulty for 
 
human things. The leads have always
been too smooth. She remembers how
a child she used to slip climbing 
in the wet air at the start of 
autumn. She broke her arm never
climbed again. Picked mushrooms in
place of it found poison country 
girls know to use a revolver
 
when faced with badgers at night but
they’ve stopped teaching belladonna
death caps and yew berries to all
but those who live in yellow houses.
The colour attracts the spores. In
summer the strawberries send out 
runners under the earth to bud 
breeding a revolution in
 
soil dark as water. The light is 
changing and we draw her on we
set tempting lights between hills spark
fires between her ears. She knows she
has to travel never knew it 
before yesterday the ship’s horn
caught her a hare in a snare. They’ve
been talking of evolution
 
her and him in the garden with 
the mushrooms and firs and glowing
the pillarbox strawberries. It’s
personal he says it’s a way
of coming to terms with yourself. 
He says but you need a gesture
out there. She says I’ll do it for you. 

Evolve
 
The sound on your tongue then--
It stretched the body
So concave and circular: clay pulled out to reverberant edges
            --waiting, poised
To meet warm ‘o’s of years.
 
Beyond flutters
In the loops of the words.
 
Foresight; like a shell--
He lay drenched in the shadows of trees
With the mouth miming only cold mist
                          That lingered (or waited)
 
Until-- once will come an un-tasted roar;
And red bark will scoop him through great tumbling years
To the lap of this primeval ‘o’
 
Which will stir words
Deep inside   (somewhere by the womb).
 
On--
or back?
It grazed the insides,
That ‘o’,
And now we wait as one
Who hovers          round a just-emptied chair.