Grave
Beside the putrefying canal,
the church is an argosy of souls
paying dues for consolation.
The graveyard extends east, west, north and south.
Against the sun, black silhouettes
instantly flourish into cold mourners.
A Boeing does not cut the silence.
The calm stone wall stands, an open frontier,
parallel to the canal.
We watch the coffin sink into the open earth.
Then the hole of light is filled with dark.
And the east wind hauls the baggage of the dead.
Pink-legged starlings bustle to their reedy roosts.
The hieroglyphs of the water hen’s feet
spell life-affirming energy.
Does my grandmother see this happen?
Does she read my mind?
Does she hear the talk of wills?
Later when the windows burn like lamps
her black windows reflect the moon.
Wish I could take up her grave
And walk the whaleback hills with her,
walking stick working one more time.
She spent her nursing life defying death.
Floating
The fields look up through a film of dew.
The house broods on its stony stand.
Windows toss out gold.
My mind is a measuring device
struggling to make sense of space.
The sun is in the lane.
The rumble of a tractor ploughing
is framed in my open window.
In the trees starlings mimic crows.
The grass and hedges smell wet green.
Apples prove gravity.
Breakfast smells send shoots
through the floor like invisible vines.
I am horizontal in a bed that floats.
There is a fiddler on my roof.
Autumn is big-bellied.
The year grows old.
I am a cyclops’s eye.
Sailing on the
surface
Summer mirror-glasses
the skin of the sea.
Quicksilvers the dimpling
deepening before the sailboats.
A gentle westerly blows
billowing dream-coat sails.
Around the buoy
The boats are a small fleet
working fast together.
In the harbour we see
Each team dreeing
their own destiny.
