Professorial types, gowned, stooped,
hands clasped behind their backs,
on the feet of their ghosts
tottering towards the sea.
Disturbed into flight,
chevron flashed, jet-sleek,
they blade low over the strand,
career upward,
out over the headland
and are gone.
Like us,
the way our souls leave.
Of course, the issue of cruelty to fish never really existed:
scaly, the antithesis of cuddliness; no legs, cross mouths
and eyes that don’t blink, well, that’s just freaky;
and, of course, they don’t scream, ugly looking critters
shaped like torpedoes; extra-terrestrial.
And still I remember the Siamese fighting fish that time after time
over days, returned to the bottom of the tank to try,
with a brush of its caudal fin, to relaunch its dying companion
or the girl in the shallows, playing with a rock salmon, lobbing it
a few yards out to sea and it returning like a dog with a ball;
was I not seeing the glint of a smile on its piscine features?
The moon is an exotic fruit sitting
precariously in the clutch of branches;
a forlorn look on its face; lost soul.
Our apple trees have been bare for months;
they spend winter in a mire of despondency,
raking the sky for fugitive fruits.
Buds are fingertips in our garden;
they are ineffectual in an expanding universe;
roots, on the other hand, have the brains for trees.
.
Sunset,
an acetylene torch,
cut a line,
an exhilaration of light
across my eyes.
A forgotten jubilation
or a future jubilation
flooded through me;
a euphoria in
the momentariness of eternity.
Well, that’s it, done, if this job is ever done. I mean ever done to perfection. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but, anyway, I’m finished.
Proofreading. Proofreading your own work involves fighting a form of blindness, the eye skating over the familiar lines; line after line of over-familiarity causing the eye not to see.
I won’t complain, it’s a new collection, the first in years. I’ve been writing all the time, but more or less in isolation. I don’t submit work to magazines or competitions, not since starting the Poetry and Miscellaneous Blog in 2007. And with that, I’ve been largely absent from poetry circles.
That’s not a great choice really, like many things, there’s an amount of self-promotion needed to succeed in the world of poetry, involving networking, having a strong presence in that world. That’s okay, not my strong suit though. Introverted by nature, I’m not a natural when it comes to mingling. So the blog was my solution, and continues to be.
And readers of my blog (there are some) know, all to well, it’s a mixed bag. A photographer discards the majority of his/her shots to publish the best. And that is best in poetry too. But keeping a blog alive requires a flow of posts, and so, for better or worse, I throw it all up there, and being digital, I don’t have to duck any rotten tomatoes coming back. Poems do require time to ferment, ideally as long as you can wait, tweaking bits here and there, re-reading, refining, planing away the bumps.
Anyway, the job is done. The Sound of Water Searching is at the publishers. It could be called ‘The Best of Poetry and Miscellaneous Yap’, which after the many years of the blog’s existence should be a good collection. If not, expect my next blog to be on snake-charming earthworms.
Last night the moonlight shimmered on the water;
I stood at my window watching its languid movement.
Lover slip into the pool;
swim immediately beneath the surface
luminescent nudity,
amorphous fluidity.
Sea gently clap,
mountains hunch forward;
squinting house eyes
see how the moon swims in the bay.
Last night the sun’s lover went shining on the ocean;
I stood at my window and watched like shadows watch.
Eventually, in love,
they withdrew into their republic of two;
behind newly created borders,
they declared independent, enacted laws,
developed new customs,
a new language, etc, etc.
My memory is that it was a closed state:
suspicious, restrictive;
the two citizens were equal
until, of course, they were not;
and that was the kernel of the subsequent unrest
and eventual breakdown of order.
In many ways, I think, their history
is the history of all states.
Things have improved, there was a time, not long ago, when windows looked like they were going to be omnipresent in our future relations; it was upsetting and somehow ridiculous. Here's Kay and I not too long ago meeting our daughter; sad to say, it's likely to happen again.
When I’ve written this,
once again, I’ll be emptied
and, once again, I’ll go rooting
through the old boxes in the attic,
the same old stuff.
Then I’ll say what I’ve already said
with different words,
and I will imagine for a while
that it is new,
and I will be pleased.
And so it may go,
till I am able to blow the words,
dry specks, off the page
and conclude finally
that I have said all I have to say.
Memories, dried flowers
in pages of time;
I wallow
knee-deep in their coloured depths,
a Monet’s garden, expecting
somehow, their aesthetic appeal
will give me some wisdom;
they will not
they are of their time,
visions incarcerated in old pages.
I will call it ‘A War-torn Landscape’:
an empty room: black, cavernous;
occasional thuds, voices, cries, remote like
the piping of sea birds faint in ocean thunder.
Centre of the room a mother weeping, her
bomb-blasted tears streaming down her face,
the grille of her teeth set into a vent of anguish,
her figure slack as peel from a knife.
I will tell you that she has been told of her son’s death
and that you must console her.
And now I must tell you that you will find no words,
and, anyway, she will not see you.
