Reflection

The haze renders a single wash

of shapes - green, grey, white, fuchsia red.

The highest peak is the baldest;

Its flanks cool the valleys below.

A lark sings its psalm of summer;

Its song slips into the blue sky,

spills the notes along the heavens.

This last hill walk is the still point

round which the kite of sun circles.
The gouged track is indifferent
to the break that snaps our fates.
Time completes the final canvas.

When the sun shines, cold shadows wait;

Where joy grows deep, sadness takes root.

Dune creep

The great sand mound grew steeper still.

But sand-storms howled it unstable.

Then a section sheared from the slope.

The slope's angle change checked the fall.

Sand-falls slid into each other,

like the parts of a telescope.

Avalanche begot avalanche.

The boomings startled the desert.

The earth trembled in loud slow beats.

The rupture cut a straight slip-face,
sliced clean by the axe of some giant.

Sands blown over the brink fell there.

So extremities grew like limbs.

The winds compel the dunes to creep.

Brush

This brush had a nice point,

no splashes, no frizzle;

The curve of its goat hair

inked hei with evenness.

It leaves the red shrike-spots

in the purple tankei.

It will not rest again

on the fudeoki.

It had pride in its work,

knew a bristle removed

leaves a mark on the page.

In temple holiness

he thanks his goat-hair brush

for enduring the use.

The dawn composes birdsong.

A cat flings its body

into spring upside down.

Blossoms glow in the haze.
This morning he will run

his nail down the bristles

of his new brush,

turn the bristles between

his thumb and forefinger,

dip the tip in water,

press it to the paper.

Train station

The diesel train hurls into the black night ahead.

Its close lights stare straight, like the eyes of a serpent.

The station exudes a sense of dislocation,

a neither-world between the past and the future,

a track-side platform to pause the passing present,

where the plot of life waits for the door to open.
We pass blankly through the stop stations on the route.
Finally, alighting, we board our lives again.

Ripples

The riffled sand crumples the shelving shore;

The beach is sorted into toga folds.
Grains in the hollows are peppery fine,
coarse in the ripple crests round shaped like sine.

Possessing the same wavelength crest to crest, 
the ripples, parallel like desert dunes,
spread like the violent slap of a giant’s hand.

Crest and trough are formed in the flat shallows

where running wavelets play out the wind-fetch,

rocking the waters below to and fro,

sculpting hillocks and hollows by fluid-flow.

Over time the ripple prints have shifted.

A stone has left a Goliath too weak

to haul himself from the ocean vortex.

Lord-godding the earth

Winter winds strip harvest-fruit altars bare,

Purify the aisles where false idols park,

Uproot the bible-bonded graveyard stones,

Flick the snapped wires from the poles and pylons.

While we lord-god the warming planet earth,

Keep an eye out for Noah in his ark,

Swim upon the waters of the deluge,

Hope for a birch bark with an even keel.

You can’t improve Lear with an upbeat end.

Job said wisdom can’t be gotten for gold.

The weather cast doesn’t say what it should:

Earth festers under our dominion.

Orchard

They hail the 66 at Islandbridge;

The sodium arc-tube gas-lights the night;

The pulse of yellow stains the skith of snow

The distortion drains the blood from their cheeks.

They feel estranged, alien, not at home.

Home is the hedged earth they return to.

The apple trees dream sun in the orchard.

Their pith souls quiver through flittering leaves.

While the ripening fruit bends the branches,

The ash-racks stand set for pressing the pulp.

They look from the gable window that glows

with books touched by the words of wild places.

Living on land that has absorbed their kith,

they speak the language of ancestral fields,

bid time of day on felloe-furrowed lanes.

Hands wet with dough she touches the tree trunks.

She transcends to the gods of space and place.

She says apples come from Tien Shan forests,

borne to the valleys in the guts of birds.

along the roads from the place silk was made.

The apple took twelve million years by chance

to fall into their brown willow basket.

Like his fiddle’s G note it faces West.

He spreads used coffee grains on orchard ground.

When he dies she’ll mourn with the apple trees.

Spitfire pilot

He spent his life escaping the limits of earth;

Life to its full freedom could not be lived land-bound.

He rode the twilight in his killer-shark spitfire,

Its hunter’s head and fin in flying silhouette.

He saw the familiar as if for the first time:

A pillar of trees in a drilled wedge of ploughed field,

An arc of ruffled water rushing by a mill,

The snow on ridges showing the rib-cage of earth,

A vast tide of crashing fields rolling on a plain,

Where owls raked the shadows when the mice and voles ran;

Once, he gently wing-tipped a doodlebug off-course.

Once, he bailed out, his plane on fire, his nerve near gone.

Above the hill-tops below the moon of morning,

Wild vapour trails bent on death swept across the blue.

Fighters and bombers in sheer violent counterpoint.

Suddenly a black smoke trail dove towards the river.

Everyone scanned the clouds expecting fire to fall.

They searched for the white flowers of floating parachutes.

Fear froze life fixed frost-fast in a fragile moment;

Dead, he returned to the vast empty space of clay.

Turner's trough

The tumult’s rush headlong into swell tilts the boat
abaft the beam. Vast miles from where the wave-making

wind-fetch begins, bow-end first, we ride the ridges

of black eclipsing the long arc of horizon.

The sea heaves crested pyramids to the windward shore.

Our boat heels over in Turner’s nightmare trough of sea;

Its roll loses us any sense of the vertical.

A sharp water-peak shoots up where two wave-crests cross.

Pitched from the crests of passing pyramidal waves,

we seem to seek submersion below our Plimsoll Line.

But we rise showing the blue staysail triangle,

and wait for a square of sun to scorch us yellow.

The billows burst, the curl of cusps break, the light shines

 in bright beams through the white frothy spindrift and spume.

In the shelving shallow leeward shore ships are at anchor.

Closed-up waves fall, break, and lather sand in sudsy surf.

A red buoy holds the sea, ships and scudding sky together.