Should I write a poem about you;
skin-tight,
revealing like a bathing suit
or a big coat
to keep you hidden
or warm.
Would you even like it,
my written portrait;
I stray into Francis Bacon mode.
Perhaps leave those bones unstirred;
maybe I should write about hands,
how they colour in Winter weather.
Napalm.
Nice to feel the sun on my back,
to idle the whole day through;
watch girls passing along the beach,
thier beautiful tanned bodies.
Nice too, the sounds of the seaside:
a speed-boat buzzing out on the water,
the tide washing onto the strand,
the screaming children.
Spent all evening alone on the strand
watching a storm’s elbows resting on the horizon,
but now its shoulders are rising.
Once, God’s eye was the centre of every storm;
I feared the Himalayan masses of His charcoal-coloured anger;
they throw the earth to its knees.
The sea, wearing requiem black, is a writhing mass,
the birds have all disappeared down a hole
and the cattle in the fields are humming nervously to themselves.
I can feel a stinging in the molecules of the air
as the clouds roll in on the wheels of their blue undersides,
coming, rumbling over distant rocks, coming.
I must hurry, lock myself away, shiny bright conductor that I am.
I must dig myself a burrow;
hide myself from the war-making God of the sky.
Morning.
Stretches her arm back to touch him,
his bed-warmed skin;
expecting the familiar response,
his finger down her backbone.
Touching marble; taut, cold;
her brain struggling to climb
to her hand’s discovery;
and turn; can she?
Morning.
It was a morning she knew might come
but the indifference of the stone shocked her;
turn; there is never a choice;
mercifully, his eyes were shut.
Seeds in June, nonchalantly,
like tourists
flying on the south-westerlies,
dawdling
where snowflakes in January
were hustled along
or the mists that spent days
‒ like looped film ‒
throwing shawls
over mountains’ shoulders.
Swallows plane lush lanes,
green larders;
later sycamore helicopters
flicker down
those same corridors
or thud, the crab apples
escaping with their summer’s booty;
globes of pinhead lights:
fruit flies in pools of sun.
The spume cutting loose
from the waves
in Winter storms,
Guinness head rolling up the beach.
Aimless flight of gulls
in the high winds
chipped off the cliff-face;
above the houses, curdled cloud,
charcoal crows,
disturbed people.
When to give up? An edited version of a oem from some years back.
The Salmon in the Spring, the Hazel and the Hermit
Into an open gob the hazelnuts fell,
so that over the years the salmon grew
into a colossus.
A day came when one nut fell plumb-line;
devoured complete with husk
at the very instant of its dimpling the surface,
it caused the salmon to spew from its intestines
the knowledge of a thousand years
that cascaded downhill
over the shilling bright stones,
through the ignorant meadows to the lake,
where it became part of an ever-shifting
circuit of water, weed, spume and silt.
A hermit, who lived by the lake,
dousing his face, drank some of this potion
and was instantly replete.
In time a hazel took root in his belly
and he convulsed
so that the stones unearthed by his flailing feet
filled the lake
and sent its waters flooding out
onto to the plain where the people lived;
so they, too, in their turn, drank;
and by this means knowledge and poetry spread
from the time that was before
to the times now and those yet to come.
