Explorer

 

Collecting your warmth on the palm of my hand,

explorer of exotic landscapes,

brushing over the warm skin,

the shallow arc of your back;

closed eyes; the sunlit concave of a desert dune

among the sun-warmed backs of dreams.

Our Days

 

Days: we grow into them,

eventually wear them snug;

you and I were different fits.

Days of mild disagreement

stacked one on the other

became disaffection;

passionate conflict

might have rekindled love

but ours were days of indifference;

we passed each other

without touching,

we went to sleep without a kiss.

Came a day when you said

you’d rather go out without me;

came the day when I did not care;

the day when you said

you’d rather live without me

and the day I did not care.

A Memory

 

I have a memory:

two lovers lying in a meadow,

a cosmos of May flowers;

their laughter swishing them

round and around

a bee-buzzing ecstatic day.

                            High up swallows tracing circles,

                            lavish displays

                            of their mastery of the air;

                            they watch with fingers entwined;

                            swallows too,

                            magnificent in their flying.

We don't imagine it

 

She holds her child in her hands,

barely more than a basket of bones light as twigs.

I see the anguish in her face, and try to imagine

the weight of my starving child on my hands

but cannot; I cannot bear to put my child’s face

on that emaciated body.

I will not bear her suffering, not even in imagination;

maybe that is why such horrors persist.

Quantum Exploration (as far as I can make out)

 

Each discovery opens the door

To a room more empty.

Converging to a point,

and it bugle-shaped to infinity.

Universe

 

Stars make space in my head.

Standing flying,

The universe without within;

Minute, infinite

I.

Harbour

Full sails once,

bulging with summer sunlight;

we would have gathered them in, eyes.

Geometries of whitened stone:

disused warehouses;

midday has lain down,

stretched out, listless beneath the walls.

Water that is lapping against the quay-side,

speak up;

what is the history of this place?

Entwined

 

Part river:

play of current on bronzed pebble-beds,

sweet.

Part stone:

tapping waters in the sound boxes beneath boulders,

their back-beat.

Part waterweed:

the choir’s descants ascend to high C,

the shape of it.

November Landscape

 

Sopping fields

green with water,

lush drumlins

sluicing November rain

down their soused sumps,

spewing stone-coloured cloudscapes

onto the road,

coughing up sozzled fences

from beer-brown drains

to hobble under their load of time

tunelessly

into winter’s torpor.

Escher style poem

 

Having arrived at my conclusion,

I embark upon a contemplation

of the issues.

Since there is nothing to consider,

I mull over them

and  reach the decision

that my ruminations are futile,

that I have already fixed

on a resolution

and that considerable forethought 

will be necessary 

for the solution I require.

Withering Peach

 

His face, a withering peach dried of happiness;

cares relentlessly tapping at his temples;

years spent yanking a livelihood from obstinate fields.

Still that skulking alertness, a hunger behind his eyes;

trigger-fast assessments, critical, begrudging;

observing the world with a lead-shot gaze.

The exertions of neighbours stored, bones for picking over

through interminable nights; nights that stack,

block upon block, building building hatred.

Hopelessly Adrift

 

Let’s say, I was to walk out in public bent into this shape:

it would be concluded that I was a half-wit;

from posture alone!

And let’s say my hair is unkempt and

I’m wearing a big black overcoat, hanging open;

people would cross the road.

If, on the other hand, I retrieve a kitten from the depths of the coat:

they’ll consider me harmless, away in the head,

still better avoided.

And, with all of that, if I appear to be perfectly happy in myself,

I’ll be discounted as a pitiful poor soul,

hopelessly adrift from reality.

Box

 

The house is a box.

I live in it,

like my skull,

among my things,

navigation markers

of my everyday.

Beyond the windows

chaos,

beautiful, daunting;

I gaze out,

make plans to negotiate it;

it stares back.

 

Happiness, a sudden burst

into song, driving along,

turning the radio up,

world streaming toward of you

and it’s all yours.

Moment

 

You, in stillness at the kitchen table,

in a melancholy slant of evening light,

gazing past the tableware 

at life.

In that moment, 

how monumental the tea things;

how infinitely small you;

how brittle life.