Bronze, copper, gold:
the boats are on the sea,
sailing past,
sailing on the wind;
waved away by branches
almost bare now.
Ghosts man the boats;
passing silently
on currents of wind,
the year in their nets;
this one glorious moment
and then they have sailed.
Unlikely now: the size of your fist;
hard, smooth, rounded; chiselled by weather, abraded
in the billions of quartz, sandstone and granite stones
constantly rolling in the tide on this cold Atlantic shore.
Limestone. I, unlike them, sprung from life;
carry my ancestors within me; crinoids, brachiopods
and bryozoa; their shells, hard parts crystallized now;
I am an assemblage that collected on the bed of another sea;
a tropical sea that teemed with life and its colours.
How far away that bright life was from the lithification that comes,
but time, all too soon, brings its darkness
and I have spent millions of years deep in the inanimate earth.
That I would see light again seemed unlikely
and yet, here I am, carrying the vestiges of a sea that once was home.
As you pass over me, you will not notice;
but my voice is there, in the tumult of the waves shifting the stones.
It is winter;
the trees are standing
on the stones.
Tips unsteady,
their branches wavering
under the weight of their trunks;
terminal buds, chock-full
of next year’s growth,
constantly stirring,
searching for precarious balance
in the cloud-whitened
shallows.
Bare toros, stems
seem pedestals
standing on arteries,
arterioles.
floors
we stand on
saw you
my love
on your ice floe
passing
waved but
you were gone
blades skimming
through desolate
heavens
ah lover
it was the flight
we fell for
passing
is what we are
Smoke from his pipe
were spirits rising
from the dead;
they coiled into the air,
graceful tresses,
defused and dissipated.
He needed sunlight
for this sorcery;
his ghosts, silvery white
hung momentarily,
umbilical, heavenward;
he was at peace then.
To turn, on eyes opening,
find again that blank space beside you;
come downstairs,
witness to the still-birth of another day;
a receptacle of words, restless
to be heard but no ear to hear them;
to move, room to room,
through the obdurate indifference of objects;
remembering warmth in memories
that leave you to its shivering absence.
Sometimes I wish I was living in a crossroads town,
less than really, a bar, a grocery store, a water tower,
far away from any place of consequence. Here heat is a cube,
in summer; people are encased in it, flies in amber.
You walk outside to look at the day, then retreat inside again;
time is irrelevant; all day is heat, every hour the same
till night comes. Nothing of note has happened since the sixties:
a fire that gathered the population together for six hours,
smoked for a day or two, then went out;
that old shop’s still there like a rotten tooth.
There’s no traffic to speak of, the wires come in on high poles,
the line of them, askew in places; you see them into the distance;
there’s nothing on the landscape to obscure the view;
turn your head, ditto in the opposite direction.
When a wind gets up, it lifts the dust, everywhere’s covered;
the view through a window gives a grey tone to the landscape,
but that’s fine, dust is part of the appeal.
People are old; they grew old while they were still young;
it is their way of dealing with the heat and emptiness; their faces
are parched soil with bright eyes embedded, and they’re gentle.
Time has stopped in my town; there’s no one racing with it,
there’s no point; that’s the way I like it.
You stood at the side of the road,
snow-covered and, as yet, unmarked.
I watched you from the window:
at first, filling your eyes with its perfection,
then weighing printing your footsteps
against being the first to leave a blemish.
And before you had even turned,
I knew your decision.
What difference: the oblivion of a newly born child
and it dead beneath a city’s rubble?
And the child born on one side
of a fence and the other?
What difference: the grief of parents of fighters
and the grief of parents of children?
And the love of parents on one side
of a fence and the other?
What difference: the child who is voluble
and the child whose words are dead in the wreckage of its lungs?
And the longing to live on one side
of a fence and the other?
What difference: the bones that support a child
and those bones smashed to uselessness?
And the care needed on one side
of a fence and the other?
Concrete walls,
steel door.
Daylight is twilight,
though
way up, light
through a window
makes a play of leaves
on the wall opposite:
by this means,
we know that we are
underground,
buried.
Our living lives
are those leaves;
how we fear
the arrival of autumn
and autumn
is almost here.
He’s got a gimp;
it throws his suit
like the buttons are one button-hole out,
and the shirt falls
below his jacket
on that side.
He walks faster to blur it;
speeds through the city throngs;
that adeptness pleases him;
the gimp’s
in his talk
too.
He tells you straight;
tells you
he’s telling you straight,
to remember what he says
or get used to
being kicked around.
And always checking behind
or glancing into doorways
like he’s in debt
all down the street,
then turns a corner like he’s
trying to lose someone.
He keeps his right hand
in his jacket pocket;
the fingers are walking too;
I think it's because some woman told him
that constant movement
is freaky.
He won’t mind my
telling you;
he’ll enjoy been written about,
and feels he’d be good on tv;
he knows they wouldn’t have him;
their loss.
Betty,
the world is a marble;
getting smaller daily;
its mildews and viruses
have spread,
and they are at your feet.
I wanted to say something
reassuring,
for, at the very least, a child
should have hope
and till corrupted,
the child is beautiful;
but, what is there to say:
this has been destroyed.
Betty,
the world is a marble;
there is no stopping it;
its mildews and viruses
are spreading always
and they are at your feet.
.
Some poems refuse to be written, over and over. This is a rewrite of a poem that seems to have a hold on me
September Swallows
September swallows
Knots
on wires unbinding,
as though their true selves,
too long furled,
must hone their aeronautics.
They lift from the wires
into giddy flight,
like crochets escaping staves
for the grander arias of global skies.
Career, dip and wheel;
a restlessness in their DNA
compels them; tomorrow,
they’ll be arrows, Morocco-bound.
Behind those children playing,
I see a grandmother smiling;
she remembers
the blur of children’s play
but it’s not that memory,
it’s their place in her heart.
These moments of happiness:
she has seen them before,
knows the thin bone china
they’re made of;
her smiles are carefree
as the children
but are of this moment;
she has lived through many years.
