Sunday, November 26, 2017

Granny



Granny in woollen cardigans, bespectacled,
smooth-cheeked, sitting at the stove end
of the kitchen table, stockings rolled down,
wanting the dog to lick the ulcers on her legs.

Cups of tea coming and going like seasons,
showers of sunlight canonizing her fitfully,
switching on the light of her soft white hair,
the wild rose that bloomed free in her face.

The comfortable plumpness of her body
always shaped to her generous curiosity;
her old voice gentle as seaweed on a wave,
chatting life back into the bones of the dead.

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

The Viewing.




Dead: the colour of old cream,
his eyes shuttered shut;
so neat, besuited and slim,
the weight he lost dying.

They made a basket of his fingers
with a rosary spilling down;
everyone said he looked lovely,
but when I touched his face
it wasn’t him at all.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

Evening

Some poems never get there. This one has been with me for nearly as long as the old man it's written about.
It's frustrating, but, then again, it's probably a good thing that certain accomplishments keep us grasping.

Evening

Evening light dozed on unwashed dishes;
old dust coated china plates;
the Sacred Heart, smoked and sagging,
looked down from a height;
a clock ticked like a jaded heart.

His face, at the table, jerked uncontrollably,
occasionally he choked on his tongue.
All that might be called life was in a biscuit box
in a press: letters, photographs, Christmas cards, postcards;
and a silver pocket-watch he got from his mother.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Rivers Run


Rivers run over the land,
slivers of sky and light,
their spindly bodies flowing,
fish and ripples one,
alive.

Clamouring in the high places,
lisping in the  low;
spry in youth,
sedate in age;
always journeying to their end
to run again.

Sunday, November 5, 2017

Peninsula

A peninsula: shingle, cockle and barnacle shells, strips of desiccated wrack,
greened with sea-holly. The wooden cabin, though frequently lashed with spray,
was salted dry, and coloured somewhere between bone and limestone;
I lived there for five months before you came.

From the land our light seemed no more than a single candle burning;
the clothes on our line had the appearance of  rags,
and the smoke from our fire curled into the sky with a nonchalance
that suggested our daily struggles with lighting washed up timbers.

You’ll remember the shingle made walking difficult; with each step the stones rolled.
You said it sounded like the grinding of a mouth full of loose teeth; but, around the bay,
 a billion stones rolled thunderously with each beached wave;
and the  breeding terns came at us like boomerangs.

Nights: we were  unlit stars perhaps, but at one with the universe, free and alive
 in the unbroken expanse of shore, sea and sky; we had  space
 to be colossal, to exhilarate; and moonlight, our spotlight to roar songs into the cosmos,
to take the universe’s light into our eyes and exult in it.

Came the day of migration: wings outstretched, muscles fluid, necks craned to our separate
destinations; we, without backward glances, took to the air
with eyes big enough to countenance the curve of the earth, greedy enough to fly it;
and left our peninsula, a finger  pointing to somewhere .

Saturday, November 4, 2017

As a chaos


1.
As a chaos of jagged girders,
black against the sky,
looks like pain;
yet it makes a beautiful ugliness.

2.
That day’s electrodes, bare and unprotected,
were waiting for me. From the moment I awoke,
nothing was ever going to halt
their run to me from that future.

3.
I met my moment on the street;
it made jazz in my bones;
lifted me
oh, much higher than I can ever sing.

4.
Sir, I said, these particles vibrate,
you hear them on a still night
and after that, you will always hear them.
They smash glass if you do not control it.

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Self-creating Fluidity in Nature



When dense enough,
murmuration or shoal,
a flow becomes a fluid,
self-created;  
all parts align, cluster and stream
according to physical  laws.

Living parts, starling or herring,
generate intra-forces  that govern
the whole, the system,
effecting dynamics  recognizable
throughout nature.