White light
sluiced from trillions
of anemones’ mouths,
all open prayerful,
free-loading on the shoulders of breakers.
It flies and crashes,
pours into ravenous bays,
slaking cathedral thirsts
whose morning, pin-shaped eyes
high up on the cliffs have turned corundum
with waiting,
wanting.
Even now,
with only vaporous memory of you,
I hear the clank of the shovel against a stone
as you dig the ridge,
see the manure on the graip
that you’re about to mix into the soil,
smell the groundsel whose roots
release so satisfyingly from the clay.
And cigarettes that would be the end of you,
I see the spiralling of their smoke
from your fingers
like each was a little dream
or the pipe lit and re-lit,
the friendly glow near your mouth;
an almost hobbit-like cosiness;
ah, those green hours spent beneath the sky.
The archipelagoes of a boyhood’s imagination:
the exoticism of islands so far east
they are unexplored expanses of the far west;
beyond them, flame-bright horizons, dreamers’ infinities.
Last evening, before sunset, beneath a sky, charcoal-blue,
Himalayan; above a misty-grey sea;
molten-magnificent and littered with low-lying islands
I found myself, again, looking out over those same South Seas.
That same enchantment, buried under years, unearthed;
a reminder that the age of exploration has not yet passed,
the excitements of childhood not yet spent;
an explorer may find limitless the wonders among the clouds.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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 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.
She in her house
converses a lot:
asks questions, answers them;
debates, argues;
always wins
the argument.
Her decor spare;
a tidy mind,
all planed to her liking,
stores pat;
a trim house.
Coming, going from her door
with the working hours;
has friends,
keeps them separate;
eventually they disappear.
She might be seen
passing a window,
then another;
always seems she’s looking
for something.
Early morning sun
in the front,
late evening round the back;
she in her house:
a stone in a box.
No one knows
what wars were waged in your head.
That you were bruising on the inside was clear,
but locked up in silence ‒ a human safe ‒
only your eyes spoke and they of pain.
And hands shaking, cigar burning
precariously close to your fingers; a storm warning.
You, sat in our company; in your own private weather,
your own private sea.
Let’s pare away what’s not needed;
carve it back
to the vein
running rich through the stone.
Not the media noise:
lazy visuals,
pulp pop.
Let’s remove, cut and cut
till we have it massive:
the elation we feel
lying side by side.
The mangled corpse: bludgeoned; skull gaping,
gore-spattered, blood-soaked. That intimacy with
slaughter, we call it savagery; their basic weaponry,
rock and branch; that engagement with violence.
And later, with the wielding of swords, the blood-bath
battles; that crush of thrashing bodies, flailing armies,
harvesting death; we call it barbarism, that intimacy
with carnage: the hacking, slitting, piercing of bodies.
To the release of rockets that kill, maim and demolish from
distance; no blood-stained tunics nor eyeballing death;
we call it civilisation: that delivery of devastation and death
with corporate efficiency, distribution worthy of the 21st century.
