From her mother’s face.

  for Kay, in memory of Geraldine

At two months, she absorbs her mother’s face,

all gentleness and giving;

smiles back without a care.

Young girl, she sees encouragement, pride,

reprimand or disappointment;

learning, reading that alphabet of lines.

As teenager, she must stretch the grain,

find different measures in new faces;

re-arrange the markers of her life.

Easy smiles and shared frowns;

in adulthood, she returns to the home

of her mother’s face.

And when those eyes are finally closed,

and the face is still, its full story written;

she carries her mother’s face onward.

The Country Child

       The Country Child.

The country child

runs in and out of rain showers

like rooms;

sees the snake-patterns in trains,

the sun's sword-play in the hedges

and the confetti in falling elder blossoms;

knows the humming in the telegraph poles

as the hedgerow's voice

when tar bubbles are ripe for bursting;

watches bees emerge from the caverns

at the centres of buttercups,

feels no end to a daisy chain,

feels no end to an afternoon;

walks on ice though it creaks;

sees fish among ripples and names them;

is conversant with berries

and hides behind thorns;

slips down leaves, behind stones;

fills his hands with the stream

and his hair with the smell of hay;

recognizes the chalkiness

of the weathered bones of sheep,

the humour in a rusted fence,

the feel of the white beards that hang there.

The country child

sees a mountain range where blue clouds

are heaped above the horizon,

sees a garden of diamonds

through a hole scraped

in the frost patterns of his bedroom window

and sees yet another world

when tints of cerise and ochre

streak the evening sky.

He knows no end, at night

he sneaks glimpses of Heaven
through the moth-eaten carpet of the sky. 

Leaving

The boat pulls away from the pier

while the houses are still sleeping.

I’m looking back at the empty windows

as though my leaving should mean something;

it doesn’t to them, but does to me.

I have fallen in love with this town, a fleeting affair;

being here has changed me,

and I know that mark is indelible.

The sky and the ocean are one; they are the vastness

into which I will throw this memory.

I will never be here again, so I allow myself watch, 

almost solemnly, as it flattens into my past.