Away

 

As a crumpled up page,

thrown there,

discarded;

in a vague way

the shape of the fist

that scrunched it;

a man

on a pavement

near a doorway

where cigarette

butts are strewn;

his face

bent close to his feet,

into his coat,

away.

What shape is our love

 

1.

What shape our love:

a circle I believe.

And what colour that shape:

buttercup yellow.

What constitutes the circle:

the village of our lives.

2.

We experience no gravity,

no ground;

when we step we fly,

when we fly we swim.

Dolphin-arced,

designed for infinity;

big and little hand,

we orbit the sun.

Still in Love with You

 

The sun playing the water;

I could hear those notes long after sunset.

Still in love with you was the song singing

 in the small hours awake;

that rise and fall,

the way the winds carry over the sands in your head;

how that play attaches to the nerve system;

how the choirs of sunlight sing you present .

His View on The Loss of Habitat

 

The loss of habitat:

“criminal”, he says.

“Not nearly enough consideration,

governments must do more.”

“A worldwide effort,

nothing less."

“Humans have been careless,

they've destroyed enough.”

He likes neatness,

his lawns to be uniform, green, carpet-like;

not a daisy to be seen,

a bee’s desert.

Sebald's Icicles

 

So when Sebaldus heaped icicles on the fire

and watched them blazing bright as firewood,

was it his faith in the benevolence of God;

had he sat in snow at -5 warming his hands by

curtains of icicles, stalactites with flaming innards?

Or had he a nuclear bent to his mind:

the emission of energy contained in crystals,

solar-induced bond dissociation in the ice lattice.

Did he foresee the nuclear radiance and the heat

that leaves people clinging, shadows to stone?

His Days

 

His days are the fields his cattle graze,

the years run from under his feet in meadows

of primrose cowslip meadowsweet fireweed: the months flying

till once again pools of sunshine, daffodils, defy February gales.

His evenings are the savage streets of New York, Los Angeles,

where he dodges bullets stumbling down fire escapes,

slips in slicks of blood running into dark alleys

then he’ll drink a cup of cocoa before flicking the world to darkness.

On a Sunday morning he drives the tractor into town for mass

and he’ll chat an hour or two over a pint in his local;

when he wipes the Guinness from his lips and walks out the door,

he returns to his days, the fields where his cattle graze.