Gull strike

Gull strike

The boat kisses the lip of the damp dock;

Tide-washed tongues of thick rope bind them;

The fish-and-salt smell makes the wind’s mouth water;

Gulls fly white circles, pecking and screeching;

Here and there they hang in the wind solving

The riddle of flying while fiercely still;

One begins his strike through the air’s hollows;

He seems an aimless missile from the moon;

But his slow-motion whiteness has eyes-on;

A man dandles a burger in his hands;

The gull turns his head like a tank's turret;

He leaves shreds of bap and tomato sauce;

Shock wake and swoop see the man jaw-fallen;

Bereft, befuddled, he bawls out his bans;
Screeching gulls and tinkling masts drown him out.

She gathers eggs

She gathers eggs

The robin’s song opens wide the sun’s eyes.

Alone she walks her own familiar fields;

The dawn is radiant on the hedges

Where her Rhode Island Reds have laid brown eggs;

One rust clocker glares with vexed orange eyes;

The order of the seasons seems intact;

The strawberries on the lane will redden;

The apples and pears have weeks to ripen,

Fall off and yield the clay their inner seeds;

She knows that she will return to the ground

That holds their seeds and creation's riddle;

Time spools life’s thread around the tree of death;

But while the hens lay, she will gather eggs;

The miracle of her routine ripples

The blue and gold-hemmed table cloth of sky. 

Back from

Back from

The stream comes from an underground spring, crosses stones

To find the river, currents nowhere finding rest;

Its moors-beginning seeks no ending in the sea;

It is like a flower that never forgets to bloom.

Clouds thin like flax-threads soar above hedges lavish

With endless insects, music, blossoms, and fragrances;

A kite hangs there in flight in boundless sun-whipped space;

The dogs bark in the burbling milky-way waters.

Distant roofs glint and a village chapel bell peals;

They drink wine from the Sussex Downs that tastes of lime;

Peals of laughter vanish into the willow trees;

The road ahead reaches to the edge of the sun.

The skin of the waters flushes full with red-haze sky;

The faces smiling back from the stream are fresh with youth;

Ideals pure as elderberry panicles,

Flush with promise, youth plumbs an endless slice of time.

Birds among the leaf-loud sycamore branches call.

The fresh green-apple mist of the pouring white wine chants

A song of friends that drifts along the lucid stream;

It is the season of youth after hard spring winds.

Dancing cheeks glisten with dew on the mossed duckboards;

In the blue sky a jet trail lights up flurried white,

Igniting desire for ends-of-the-earth adventure;

A great mirage of time breaks free in their glances.

The high grass gives a lush harmony to the fence

Where the tail-flicking black mare gently rubs her neck;

Breezy butterflies taunt the sippers of flower wine;

They hoard the good-fortune hours the setting sun leaves.

Idly gazing on laughter, wine and easy chat,

The sun lingers west in vain for a place to drop;

Tears of laughter and drops of wine find stream water;

Their dreams flow along the boundaries of heaven.

Their glasses toast the jewel filigree of moon;

Too kindred now this carefree moment to scatter,

They embrace before the winds come that buffet dreams

Or memories yellow like leaf-falls in autumn.

Moonlight tumbles their shadows, branches sweep the mist,

A dew-fall light bathes the trees where crows have settled;

The wine of water and vine has been drained from glass;

The stream bears finger-tips of sip drops to the sea.

Flush-faced they sing echoing out over the stream;

They are born and die out of nowhere, but they live;

Their time was, is now, and will be till heaven’s gate.

Back from war their shadows ripen into themselves.

Last salute

Last salute

The geese had announced his motorcycle;

He held a photo album in his hand;

Blue helmets, armoured cars, burnt grass, dirt roads;

Twice they’d spat in death’s eye:

A bullet through his pack -

From a train-carriage door;

A mortar he heard hit

The ground – lucky - no blast.

They found bits of hacked bodies and raped girls,

Discarded, denuded of dignity,

No resurrecting dew to revive them.

He and the captain, seasoned warriors,

Tested, bound by a knot of comradeship,

Gathered the bits up like twigs for a fire;

The pale captain soft-spoke:

‘We’ll have a smoke – the flies’;

There was no rightful thing

To speak, just smoke the stink

The angels of death left.

No one raised a cry over the butchered;

Nor did heaven drip down reviving dew.

Nor did angels of peace weep bitterly.

They returned from the Congo sound of limb;

But earth-stopped mouths gaped dead on their pillows;

The hacked limbs haunted, horrified their sleep;

The sarge kept a panga

On his bedside locker,

The captain a hurley,

Beside him on the floor.

Their wives knew fear sickens.

There was no memorial of last words;

They each had a glass of Tullamore Dew;

While the geese grazed the grass, they saluted. 

Come back to earthrise

Come back to earthrise

The moon of your sadness spins in a black hole of skies;

The cinders of sorrow rinse ash through your eyes;

Your ears hear the silence and your colours are blind;

The wild cats are running on the walls of your mind.

Come back to the dawn and the bright light that sings you;

Listen for the love peal of the bell that rings you;

Come back from the dark moon, come back to earthrise;

There we’ll dance the silence and sing the noise.

The voice from your soul cries like a maimed fox;

The core of your being screams hurt at red rocks.

The flow of your mind boils like the wild sea

Where clowns of wild colours spin somersaults for free.

Come back to the dawn and the bright light that sings you;

Listen for the love peal of the bell that rings you;

Come back from the dark moon, come back to earthrise;

There we’ll sing the silence and dance the noise.

Suffragette

Suffragette

Flop-winged lapwings peeweep peeweep above the plough;

She stares at the arum, pale-green spathe curving round

its white spiky inflorescence, spearing blue sky;

Promise shines in the sunlight and in the clay pores

Where fresh blades of barley slice through the faint furrows;

Her eye like a sleek hawk skims the crests of the trees;

The light transfigures space in the tree-tunnelled lane;

The gold bright-boled poplars vibrate her artist’s eye;

Shrill song from the thicket and loud laughing voices

Make a mingled chime of joy and lighten their hearts;

As the sun goes down the girls speak of their idols:

One girl mentions Eminem and Pete Doherty,

Another JK Rowling. A long list unfurls.

As her mind paints the dropping sun, she surprises them:

‘My suffragette great-gran was hit by cops on horses;

Male medical students threw muck and stones at her

And shouted in her face that she needed raping’;

What seemed a long lost past lights a moral present;

Her proud voice remembering courage plumbs their souls.

Gunslinger's bible story

Gunslinger’s bible story

The flat-stone at the well is a doorframe

To tranquillity, a liminal place,

Where a girl may acknowledge her hero;

The well, a meeting place for the village,

Gives time to schmooze, to form first impressions;

Three women met their true loves by a well;

I know Rebecca bore a water jar

Filled full with fresh spring water from the well;

When she gave Abraham’s man Eleazer

A sip and watered his kneeling camels,

He selected her to be Isaac’s bride.

I know Rachel, whose name means ‘ewe’, walked sheep

To the well in the field where Jacob stood;

He was so smitten he rolled on his own

The heavy flat stone from the deep well’s mouth;

In a blink Rachel fell in love with him;

Jacob kissed her, lifted his voice, and wept.

I know Zipporah, a Midianate,

Met Moses at a village well;

He dealt with the shepherds who tried to stop

Her drawing water for her father’s sheep;

Her father Jethro asked him to break bread.

Three women met their true loves by a well.

Like Rowdy Yates, I waited by the well,

A step of true biblical proportions;

I wore a black waistcoat, chaps, a black hat,

Bandana, holster, belt, metal buckle,

leg ties, two six-guns, and a Winchester;

I was rawhide and gunslinger in one.

I know Jacob dressed up in Esau’s clothes;

Joseph wore a coat of many colours;

The Pharaoh dressed him in a linen coat;

Tamar dressed herself in a veil to trick

Judah into fathoming her cold womb;

But I was not suited up to deceive.

She came to fill her bucket at the well;

I wanted her to join my cattle drive;

She had not a sip for me or my horse;

Like Joseph was supposed to be I was:

Torn to pieces; she could not hear my heart;
Aged twelve, I learned to listen, not just see.

Let the young have their Spring

Let the young have their Spring

Let’s not forget our own first earth,
Or pretend it’s a new heaven;
No one knows the abode of gods,
Though some whitewash this simple fact.
Let the young find faith in their youth,
And love for the human heartbeat;
No one draw down the coffin blinds
On their vitality of eyes.
So let them crowd their sky with stars,
And sow the grain for harvest time;
No one drown out their songs of Spring;
Their true birthright is freedom’s gleam.

Picasso

Picasso

A passion ready to rescue a bolting horse,

His hand powers perpetual transformations;

He goes for broke, transforming the natural fright

So that the real flies apart and is remade

At abstraction’s brink and the timeless turning point

Of the real: almond-eyed Jacqueline imagined,

Jacketed enigma seated in soft old-space

Tabled light and hard-lit head-dressed geometrics;

Transforming from litheness to voluptuousness;

No past or future, always living the present.

He is bent on his singular pitch-point in paint,

His deep-feel heart in accord with ordinary us.

God's symposium

Piet Kamerman and God’s symposium

God calls us all for dry martinis at seven;

It is symposium time in heaven;

The eudemonic chewing of Plato

Makes an essential meal of the Tayto.

 ‘Is the drink organic?’ asks Aristotle,

Who prefers the teleological in a bottle;

Beckett won’t talk about Godot,

Because he wants to do the Lotto;

Aquinas has a view on everyman

He insists on sharing with de Chardin;

God shouts: ‘Lights down! Piet Kamerman

Will now perform ‘Dansen met Suzanne’.

Book collectors

Book collectors

The books are piled in bundles on the two-wheeled wooden barrows;

In the pungent shop air brooding book collectors bend and browse;

The pepper dust tickles faces bow-taut with expectation;

The subtle theatrics of searching requires low-key acting;

Remembered near-misses, and prizes nailed, rarefy the brain,

And there is always a rare text missing, a need to complete.

They carry around their necks the millstone of a high mission;

These book lovers struggle against the sheaf-scattering of texts,

Fragments of an unnameable disaster that may burst through;

Bringing together, making complete, what belongs together,

They solidify what they find in sequenced affinities.

In the white heat of a rare find, they burn in quiet ecstasy;

And the ache of sighting demands the throb of acquisition.

Their archival minds are encyclopedia of book craft:

Cataloging editions, bindings, place names, fonts, owners;

The bagged books, looking like lipless teeth, are boxed in car boots;

In the mouth of a shelf they regain the register of voice;

On the float of shelves the shiver of time shudders through their pages;

They plead the cause of the human before time’s cancellation.

Each saved book has two mythical moments alive in balance

In two parallel tracks of time each heavy with allusion:

The seen on the shelf and the unseen in Platonic essence;

On time’s second track the books are purged of all traces of use;

There is no why, where, when or whither, only essential what;

Book collectors are seekers of the perfect in fonted form.

Thirsty work

Thirsty work

Out in the mown low field, on a hot bone-dry day,

He leaned on his long pitchfork under the lime tree;

The sun scrawled leafy-lights graffiti on his trunk;

His bared head was pale, wet like a washed potato;

He drank well water from a small lidded tin can;

He mopped eye-stinging sweat from the brū of his brow;

His gulps told us that turning hay is thirsty work.

The sunken lane

The sunken lane

The sun has rounded earth’s circus safely.

Dawn holds a singing robin in her hand.

A cataract of light pours its bright gold,

And opens the fields to the length of day.

Bending its gaze uphill towards a cream house,

The sunken lane is an enchanted place.

Its rust-enamelled gate guards its domain

Of mystery, where refuge seems to lie.

The trees, disposed at intervals, space

Out some inner design, and reflect the sky,

Where the pink of a shock of flamingos

Swims mirrored in a metallic blue lake.

From this stony angle of ground

The tangents of a young boy’s mind curved up

Crossing the stile of imagination,

Where things changed shape like Melies’s magic moon.

Here a desperado could lurk in peace,

Or a Lakota brave find hallowed ground.

A ninja turtle would have camouflage;

Or Mario a hedge to skim his cart ;
Can a place shape itself into your soul?

In the purplish brown of late evening,

Promising a world past the physical,

This question fines itself into thin air;
And the sun rounds earth’s circus once again.

Sounds

Sounds

A fraction after the Big Bang

Space was bodied forth,

1000 trillion degrees hot;

The universe cooked-up

And then it cooled,

Producing stars and planets,

And the static that crackles on my TV.

In 1929, Hemingway's mother

Posted him a chocolate cake;

In the parcel was a revolver,

His father's suicide .32 calibre;

He threw the gun into a lake;

And the weapon sank;

The splash went deep.

The cow who failed her test

Was alone in the byre;

All night I heard

Her mournful moos;

Stars stared from sky-black puddles

At the heavens indifferent

To her lowing.

The patch of notes

Was hot off his pencil;

Counterpoint was harmony;

In The Burning Fiery Furnace

Britten had a Babylonian drum

In the procession,

But no roller skates.

Staring at the headland Kavanagh

Leaned on a five-bar gate;

The gate was skewered on

The hinges of a side post;

The flaked frame creaked;

He leaned there

With a great hunger.

After the tsunami

The man understood why

The stream had the old name

‘Stream of the Big Ship’,

Three kilometres from the ocean;

He said the cry of a baby

Reminded him he was alive.

Listening to Mozart’s music

We know his notes exist;

Philosophers wonder:

When a tree falls

To the flat forest floor,

And no one is there,

Does it make a sound?

The stage is silent

When Estragon is beaten up;

During this interval we sip wine;

We do not hear the terror,

In the screams of displaced persons;

Silence is the sound

Of not listening.

The cobalt sky leans

Its weight on the crashing waves;

Yachts with contraband

May be readying their dinghies;

That is why

LE Samuel Beckett is at anchor

Waiting for Go…

Temple Bar pub crawler

Temple Bar pub crawler

What are his axes? Up-down, back-forth;

Left-right; time past and time to come? No!

He has lost his grip of space and time;

Length, width and height have inwardly curved;

He loops around his curled dimensions,

He is in a higher dimension

Where the force of gravity is barred;

A pub crawler, waiting for the grip:

the event horizon, the black hole,

And entropy. His puking rest-mass

Lies on granite sets in Temple Bar;

He’s exhausted his capacity

For yet further entropic increase,
And dryly retches flat on Fleet Street.

String Theory

String Theory

To log relations between us

We measure using space and time;

Once past the atavistic state,

In a freshly realised state,

Now threaded on the primal slate,

The strings of space and time vibrate;

Before this stitch in time, what was?

Just a piece of membranous string?

I like the thought that everything

Hangs on the thinnest piece of string;

It’s why we get ourselves in knots,

And why we feel so all strung out.

Urn you insight

Urn your insight

Silkscreen this bare truth onto your t-shirt;

The world is a vast cosmic accident.

It is just the way it happens to be.

Nature is as it is, there reason ends.

Why do quantum particles come and go?

And particles and anti-particles

Combine and then destroy one another?

The luck is that particles have the edge.

Gods dice with Albert Einstein’s universe.

The mind hits a wall of absurdity.

And yet we feel awed wonder at it all.

We see beauty that is more than skin deep,

Marvel at the complexity and trawl

For the why of logical completeness,

Seek ultimate truth north of the North Pole;

Keat’s urn says beauty is truth, truth beauty.  

I long for

I long for

I long for religious wars to end.

Reduce godly sensibility

to its basic parts and you will find

it has shimless commonalities

with a godless sensibility.

All our gods must be able to swim

in the common waters of the good.

Listen to the Fragrance

Listen to the Fragrance

In the basin of Kyoto the people dream

of dragons rising from fast rivers where ghosts gleam;

The lighthouse marks a focal point for Buddha clouds

Floating above the right-angles and pane-glass crowds;

The beams of the Amida-do hold with thick ropes

of women’s hair, breakable hemp, and braided hopes;

And sea god Ryujin answers a clap that soars

In Shokokuji where a dragon in wood roars.

The Noh gone from the open fields keeps the white stones;

The back wall has a painted pine in gold green tones;

Eternal distance backgrounds the evergreen line;

The hana breathes transcendence, the pine breathes divine;

A grasp works a hangi of cherry-blossom years;

On the karakami plane Buddha clouds appear;

As the mica dries in the mystic candlelight

the alighting clouds become fire-poem sprites in flight.

In the manga store they hear the hyoshigi

clapping news of the gaito who like a benshi

tells painted-picture stories of hero wide eyes;

Manga and anime fans view kamishibai,

Sip sencha tea from Uji and eat apple sweets,

laughing like old-timers in their best theatre seats.

The calm nun cuts agarwood for burning incense;

She tells them they can achieve serene transcendence;

She buries hot coal in ash, firms the heap around,

With a fire iron makes a hole in the ash mound,

lays a mica plate on the hole, sets the wood down,

and shapes her prayerful hands into an angel’s gown;

She says take your time and listen to the fragrance;

The calm scent is a divine lesson in patience;

Yeats spent the whole morning listening to incense,

Hummed out the feel of words in the room next to Pound’s;

Then he walked down to the village to buy a stamp;

But the post office was closed and he was surprised;
It was Christmas day; he felt double-lock surprise.

Kiso

Kiso

Just before spring planting

The paddy fields are flooded.

In the surface of the water

The sky falls in terraces.

On the rock-ribbed hill

The cherry blossoms

Bloom along the path.

They blow in the wind;

They dance in the light;

They breath in the air.

Along the old trails

Over the mountain

Are memorials

to the gentle Kiso,

Who pulled sleds packed

With provisions;

Heavy rain washes the namako walls;

Bonito is smoked over cherry flames;

A spring bubbles from the mountain;

Where a fresh-water crab forages.

Beyond the lush green tea bushes,

The snow falls on Mount Fuji.

I owe you speech

I owe you speech

I stand by the green post-box;

A double-decker’s eyes stare at me;

An unwritten letter blanks my brain,

A cheque without the sum owed;

The empty page barred my words;

I know that I owe you speech.

A Thick Fold of Snow Skin

A Thick Fold of Snow Skin

The hedges, houses, and lanes that vanished in the dark

Have returned to the blurred earth roughly drafted in snow;

The ragged white drumlins look like clean laundry;

The laughing moon’s silence deafens the ears of angels;

The Corvally meadow field shines silver like a perch’s spiny fin;

The bog-black flaxhole wears the stars like an amulet;

But the spring well fixes the sky with an angry glass stare;

Its searing sacred eye breaks the full moon into pieces;

In the pub a piper plays a profane liturgy of sociability;

A thick fold of snow skin grows on his Vauxhall Viva.

Fiddle and accordion help him climb the bine shoots of a jig;

None hears the clock spring’s invisible tune as it slacks; 

Like Lazarus rising renewed from bed to milk his goats,

They will stamp the knife-glint morning crispness to the byre.

First Fruits

                First Fruits

From your plot of land;

You have cleared the tangle of thorns;

By callused open-aired hand

You gave shape again to Jack Dave’s.

Now threads of sunlight freshen green

The seaweed soul of your soil;

The sea-sucking southerlies stream

Water on planted seeds.

Veterans of winter’s icy rasp,

The supple saplings are at slender ease;

The smell of vegetables is a granted wish

On the warm honeysuckled breeze.

In the field where rushes grew,

The donkeys heft their hooves up;

You don’t mind the birds that queue

On the soot-flecked chimney;

You have picked the first fruits;

On the apron of Itzack Rabin Square,

You wash soil from the stem and roots

Of what you will eat today.

In long-armed Bantry Bay a dream

Gleams on a dolphin’s back;

It is life not just first fruits you redeem;

And on your story Moses smiles.

I can see Christmas Day

I can see Christmas day

Smoke from the chimney patterns its yarn to the sky;

The roof is folded inside a white envelop;

The hill is a rumpled parcel a giant slept in;

Snow fell last night like lost letters from the heavens;

Mark shouts from the lane he was first to find the snow.

The air mists into the old bottom-field flaxhole;

Eyelets of icicles lace light through the hedgerows;

We walk the sparkling air by the fast flat-stone stream;

Our faces glide like lilies on the water’s skin;

The wakened Dan asks, ‘Did I hear Santa last night?’

My somersault of memory springs back to now;

Pigeons are asking questions of the naked trees;

On my phone is a photo of Mark laying down

A new schoolroom floor for bright kids in Arusha;

Dan phones me asking, ‘What time is Mark’s flight due in?’

Under this steep leafless sky I can see Christmas day;

The leaping stones cheer, the stream throngs with singing choirs;

Orla spreads the warm wings of her wide-eyed welcome;

The sound of astounded mother’s love wakes the sun;

The sight of our boys births our souls back to wonder.

River Brim

River Brim

Below the tree line the red sun drops like a flare.

A light bluish mist lifts from the river’s surface.

The river water brims like milk in a cow’s teat.

Cream petals drift along the wet bank weightlessly.

A warm rose scent wafts through the idling steamy air.

Cloudy green currents tumble the swift wild waters.

The river casts its glinting lure to reel me in.

The reek of the chilly water seizes my lungs.

I can’t see the bottom and my limbs are shadows.

Beneath the river’s skin is a world of secrets.

I wonder what hides like a toothy pike lurking

in the green opacity to prey on a shoal.

This river rises in a mysterious place,

But it never loses faith in its direction.

It doesn’t know it has shaped our villages and towns

And nourished our land, our wonder, words and writing;

The skin of every sliding stream hides a poem

waiting to froth the reeds like agitated foam.

From the deep murk there rises in bright fountain spurts,

A gush of images and a downpour of words.  

Home to Roost

Home to Roost

He roared his Puch to the ceili in Clontibret,

His fiddle and bow packed with care in a black case.

The pub-snug talk was of scandal in high places;

There was levity in their delight in downfall;

Fiddlers talked a word statue for Seamus Ennis;

He was always crucified higher than the thieves;

Someone passed round a thumb lost to the wood-mill blade;

Luke cocked his ear bar-close to hear what tunes had wings;

He hated silage and battery-hen producers;

He liked to taste hay in beef and eat soda bread;

Once in the door home he cooked beef in the oven,

And gave his mother a plated juicy portion.

It was the darkest time before dawn but she ate,

Even though she was fading fast before his eyes;

Between silences they’d wring out the residue

of truth from the pose and posture of the past day;

The day through like water under the canal bridge,

She could go to bed knowing he was home to roost.

Khersonsky

Khersonsky

Lights hang from trees in the crystal moonlight.

Where musicians used to trick with kletzmer.

Poets stab urgent sentences left unfinished.

Mute philosophers squint bitter insights.

Statues play politics in City Garden.

The grass in the park is lush as lettuce.

Sycamores crack barks on Richelieu Street.

Pushkin liked the European ambience;

Till he full-fathomed the governor’s wife,

And had to button up in a hurry.

Brodsky’s angry dust crackles nastily;

He railed against Shevchenko’s ‘gibberish’.

Flame marks on buildings testify to hate.

Odessa smells like a burnt bowl of borscht.

To hold to your signature idiom;

To join the table of prophetic poets,

For whom moral freedom is oxygen;

To keep calm when the clock ticks into night;

To shed terror in the dark before dawn;

To sound the common rhymes of existence;

To stare the intimations and not flinch:

These tests are easy when you know for sure

Putin’s squad won’t plant a bomb at your door;

(Poets are free then to grab the lion of angst.)

They struck at a poet’s flat in Odessa -

Hiding the bomb under refuse sacks,

Hurting the woman who was once his wife.
But Khersonsky keeps faith with Odessa.

Crowey Bridge

Crowey Bridge

Single-arched between the 13^th and 14^th locks,

Spanning the strait Ulster Canal,

Over a towpath platform running north,

Crowey’s humpback bridge is in the domain of air.

Among looming grassed-over pyramid drumlins,

The eye can find there grass towpaths,

A milestone, two masonry locks, bollard. 

The humpback bridge compresses panoramic space.

On hot days the humpback draws the sun even closer;

Fuses the unearthly with limestone

Walls, granite cappings, string course over arch;

We recall and forget through soil-and-stone mindscape.

A thrust-thatcher’s tool, the spurtle for knotting straw,

Corn sheaves being stooked on Farley’s farm,

A Magic-Miles-in-Monaghan poster,

High hedges bending to the breeze. She remembered.

A time when this canal of reluctant water

Was already decades disused,

But before the railway faced erasure,

And stopped freighting maize to Wallaces’ mill.

On this space divided by an ellipse of stone

The sun one side, moon the other,

The outspread wings of flowers in the hedge,

Sissy hugged them all goodbye to nurse in London.

Before the strata of memory slipped away,

She told me old Ned McMahon cursed

Jesus-Mary-and-Josephs at her dad

For letting her go to nurse where trouble brewed.

The pewter of a bulbous black cloud bottoms out

Among shadows and reflections;

Memory-markers in lush Tehallan.

Remembered by things, so by things we remember.

Hands of Love

Hands of Love 

Although the hands of our love were at noon, death came.

I thought our blossom hour had only just begun.

Your empty pillow disasters my composure.

This loneliness for you is like an unseen wound.

I’m like a shipwrecked sailor without a compass;

My very skin cargoes memories of your touch.

Grief would be easy if I had a cut-glass heart.

When petals fall I know the flowers follow you.

I'm an elephant whose trunk feels for its mate's bones.
Time’s flame tried hard to burn our candle down to wax.

But nothing can change the prime colours of our love;

They pass straight through the misty pane of memory;

Nothing can unspeak the perfect tense of our time

When the stars stopped to see the look I gave to you.

I miss the rich rub of minds and the loving look.

In spring’s golden soil I’ll plant love’s heroic rose;

You would not want me to cancel the leaves of spring,

Or allow the lava of grief turn heart to stone.

Today a wonder-waltz of waving winter flowers,

And a coal-lustred blackbird pulping crab apples

With his bold beak filled me with star-set wonder;

I saw your face there as silent as a daydream;

The mirror of my ice-blue mind misted over;

Although every morning means a new farewell,

I sleep warm nights in the memory of your arms.

The tears I shed are silver for the grace of love.
The dust of your star vibrates in my unstill soul.
Across the oyster sky under a pearl-pale moon,

The sailing north wind blows banners of sleeplight snow;

Above this canopy shines a stream of bright stars;

I’ll trace the heavens with these stars to make a poem
Of grateful love that diamond-cuts our happy time.

Root Notion

Root Notion

The cat you can set your clock by scowls by the range;

On the warm sill a butterfly dreams of pillage;

The window spectrum tapestries her spread oilcloth;

In the milk jug’s blue bands the tossed sky swells;

We skirmish quietly in the blush of waking up;

Gran’s poker stirs the dust from the range’s red coals;

The mugs flow with the pouring music of brewed tea;

Eating porridge toast and fry takes no time at all;

Past, present, future fuse in every mouthful;

She speaks of Shifra and Puah, who disobeyed

The Pharaoh and kept the Hebrew newborns alive;

Her “another egg?” is really an insistence;

Saying no thank-you we thank her and go milking;

She opens her mouth wide but does not speak a word,

Like a bell that swings silently without a tongue;

We knew we had enough because she always gave

Us more than enough; she fed for posterity;

Just a life span from the dead her people mourned for,

She still felt down there deep in her past the hunger;

Her root-belief was all must live on full bellies;
Into her meals all the turns of day coalesced.

the cheeks of bitter on beaver street

the cheeks of bitter on beaver street

leopold saves stephen’s skin on beaver street

from the whores ‘n watchmen on their beat

raving genius stephen has had his spree

rudy kisses the holy book his eyes can’t see

unseen mist rolls along the docks helter-skelter

blanketing butt-bridge cabman’s shelter

from sackville street to amiens street station

it blinds the creator to his creation

the two men talk now unsure uneven

to a sailor from the three-mast rosevean

they harbour phantoms from the past

and lash their lost selves to the mast

an uphill walk takes them to eccles street

on a path of talk that’s bittersweet

leopold’s fumbles for his latch-key

he gets in through the scullery

He serves stephen cocoa with cream

And invokes his own poetic gleam

the topical verses in rhyme

he wrote for a gaiety pantomime

but stephen continues on his flight

heads out into the warm june night?

a heaven stree of stars in the absolute

hangs with humid nightblue fruit’

daybreak comes to beaver street

leopold makes out his budget neat

two pounds nineteen and three

but there is no entry for epiphany

it’s a long talk from beaver street

to molly’s bed in eccles street

to snore his sleep head to feet

and taste the warm cheeks of bitter-sweet

don’t you think that Stephen was cruel

to sing the ballad of little larry hughes?

Rothko’s White Centre

Rothko’s White Centre

He gives us a perspicuous flat-plane moment;

Blocks of colour for humans to make a dwelling place;

The black water suits the soil for ploughing and planting;

The golden sunlight swells the green pea in the pod;

The pink lavender is the spring of contemplation;

In the pink and rose there is the festival of first fruits

Here we heed a call to return to existence,

Finite beings with double awareness who

Face the task of being heroically alone;

Who must return to the home of necessity;

The emblems of honest need are fragments of sacrament;

He frees us to sing the psalm of many colours;

To cut a hole through the ice and see the deep;

To dry ourselves from a drenching of the sceptical;

To turn our faces from the flickers on the back-lit cave;

To wonder when the warm light filling the ears of corn

Stirs the sheaves to wave at the liquid sickle sun,

To honour the salty reapers who with bent spines gather grain;

To leave the forgotten sheaves for hungry neighbours;

The white is the salt of the plated offering

That replaces blood sacrifice eight days after creation;

It is also the unhusked flour that makes our daily bread;

It tells us we can be at home everywhere with everyone;

Here Stan might dance as melodiously as Fred;

For all the tap-tap syllables of colour say ‘I exist’

Lear would not have cudgelled Cordelia to hear her love;

It is miraculous that a gleam of light in the brain flashes sense;

It is miraculous that a painting can the day after mean at all;

The miracle is he enacts the theatre of finite human belonging;

The miracle is the silence is so accurate because it risks adventure;
You ask, How should I live? What do I owe others?

Light Bath

Light Bath

Pale as beeswax the moon the rock of rhythms

Counts time in the ebb and flow of the tides;

As the earth revolves in oval around the sun,

All these charted changes go on in calendar;

But every age is bathed in its own light;

The revolution had its oil lamps with thick wicks;

The guillotine beheaded in the light of Chinese lanterns;

The old gas torches had a butterfly flame;

Vienna was ghostly in the gloom of gaslight jets

That brushed the trees with yellow light;

But for lovers on the town night became a festival;

The cigarette lighter roasted fingers over a low flame;

Electricity served the goal of universal illumination;

Pale pearly moon bulbs lit up streets and rooms;

The perjured eye saw the holes in lovers’ shoes;

They were free to close their curtains on the sun

And seal up the innermost spaces of the soul;

The light was reflected in stretched ligaments of wood;

Using mannequins Nadar photographed Parisian catacombs;

The crowd from the boulevard were moths to the flame;

The camera snapped the phases of Venus passing the sun;

The photo flash startled the eyes of personalities to exposure;

Now artists had no choice but to torture paint to the point of absurdity;
Guernica pleas for the flash of civilised moral consciousness.