Looking up through the oaks

1.

Winter-flayed

lungs;

bronchioles

begging

futile.

2.

A close-fisted sky,

marble-faced,

fracturing.

3.

Stultified

neural network.

Her Home

 Listening to a report on women been beaten and abused in their homes. Thinking of the horror of their lives in the very place a person should expect sanctuary from hardship and misery.  

Her Home

There’s no place like home

for the nuturing of wounds

beneath the soft flesh.

Your home is your castle

with the stoutest walls

to protect your privacy.

Home is where the heart is

nailed to the bullseye

of his dart-board.

Home sweet home

where torture

fills the cupboards.

Days

 

Days are the harvest of time. Each, like a segment

of film-strip lit with its own light and,

for all the seriousness that fill them,

they are as delicate as the dandelion seeds that stream in

their billions through a bright summer’s afternoon.

Turn your palms down, look at the parchment

on the backs of your hands; a certificate of life.

You carry it; it stays with you, ends with you;

a reason to celebrate for today all our days are this one day;

it is an exhilaration to be.

The Hands That

 

In death it’s often the hands

cranked square immobile

hold the eye;

held solid

that dead soul.

Ah, the hands that could

catch love

now stoney

The Photograph

 

My father in a beam of sunlight from the kitchen window,

the rest of the room a dim background; hands extended,

bending down to his granddaughter, minute particles of dust

glistening around them.

Vermeer-like: an intimate moment made still and lasting in

a slant of light, a gentleness isolated from the moving world;

a glimpse to slow the pulse, stop at the pool of a mind,

contemplate the heart.

Starry Night

 

The intricate weave

of their rhythms

glint and ripple

glitter and flow

sometimes loud

sometimes low

I sit through the early hours

listening

to the stars’ music

across the carnival of the sky

those haphazard harmonies

making an ear of the eye

Cigar Smoke

 

Outside, in dim night light, smoking a Christmas cigar,

looking along the front wall, the angle it makes with the eaves,

the dark triangle at the top of the down pipe;

exhaling a plume of smoke, watching it diffuse beneath

that geometry, the smell of Christmases long gone.

Faces, faint holograms now, waft on that tobacco thermal.

Viewing them coolly in the dank air, those that carried me to now;

life a succession of relations with others,

the rise and fall of characters through my own story,

lights that shone, dazzling or dim, and lights that went out.

They smile, talk and laugh, settle cups on saucers, swish whiskey

round crystal glasses, roll cigars along lips before lighting.

I watch them: acts and scenes on stages that are gone, my boarded up theatres;

watch them,  essential links, coffin-bearers

and stubbing out the butt of my cigar, return to the lights in the house.