With your face

 

Evening soft Autumn light;

the year’s foliage 

becoming humus,

new soil;

smell of decomposition: 

mossy,

next year's fertility;

you standing,

foot on shovel, king of ridges;

colour of ripeness 

heading towards rot;

unknown then

your lungs discolouring,

hardening

as Winter hardens.

Today, standing

in  dank November

preparing the soil

for next year's growth

with your face

but older now

than you ever were,

thinner;

watching the  years pass

in  tides of  growth:

the relentless march

of seasons pulling

me after you;

seeing the soil

as home.

Morning

 

Morning.

Stretching her arm back to him,

his bed-warmed skin,

expecting the familiar respnse,

his hand to her cheek;

she touches marble; taut, cold;

her brain caves 

at her hand’s discovery;

and turn, can she?

Morning:

a morning she knew might come

but the chill of that stone in her bed!

Turning: there is no choice;

mercifully, his eyes were shut.

A Fine Intelligence

 

His mind sparks explosions in four cylinders, maybe six;

pistons rise and fall, connecting rods turn the crankshaft,

clutch flywheel disengaged a moment, gears shifted and

torque in the wheels altered. His engine purrs; he mulls 

turbo with or without variable compression, and always 

finds that quadratic equations and poetry hinder performance.

A hand extended

 

A hand extended;

normally one would shake it;

it is a child’s hand

sticking out from under the rubble of war.

It All Happens At Once

Life

A stone skimmed across the water imagines wings

at the same moment a mayfly flickers golden sunlight

into the onyx eye of a granite-speckled trout.

Holding it with tweezers under his desk-lamp

an artist is marvelling at the multi-faceted

window that is a mayfly’s wing;

that’s when the trout’s teeth crush

and the stone sinks.

Hard Labour

 

Never been so aware of the lungs as bellows;

how basic it becomes when, in dying,

one is reduced to breathing and we are

watching each breath

like you are lifting shovel-fulls

and so alone in the effort 

and we so useless.

The end of August, into September

 

It's the end of Summer. There is a noticeable coolness setting in and the evenings are darkening sooner. As nature flags the moving on the year with the disappearing snowdrops, the arrival of lambs, the explosion of whitethorn, so the restlessness of swallows marks the onset of the cooling year.  

September Swallows

Careering, dipping, wheeling;

knots  unbinding, 

lifting from the wires

(crochets escaping staves)

as though their true selves

too long furled

must be released in flight.

The restlessness in their DNA

compelling them to escape 

to the grandeur of global arias;

smooth their energies

to become tomorrow's arrows

Morocco-bound.