Should I write a poem about you;
skin-tight,
revealing like a bathing suit
or a big coat
to keep you hidden
or warm.
Would you even like it,
my written portrait;
I stray into Francis Bacon mode.
Perhaps leave those bones unstirred;
maybe I should write about hands,
how they colour in Winter weather.
Napalm.
Nice to feel the sun on my back,
to idle the whole day through;
watch girls passing along the beach,
thier beautiful tanned bodies.
Nice too, the sounds of the seaside:
a speed-boat buzzing out on the water,
the tide washing onto the strand,
the screaming children.
Spent all evening alone on the strand
watching a storm’s elbows resting on the horizon,
but now its shoulders are rising.
Once, God’s eye was the centre of every storm;
I feared the Himalayan masses of His charcoal-coloured anger;
they throw the earth to its knees.
The sea, wearing requiem black, is a writhing mass,
the birds have all disappeared down a hole
and the cattle in the fields are humming nervously to themselves.
I can feel a stinging in the molecules of the air
as the clouds roll in on the wheels of their blue undersides,
coming, rumbling over distant rocks, coming.
I must hurry, lock myself away, shiny bright conductor that I am.
I must dig myself a burrow;
hide myself from the war-making God of the sky.
Morning.
Stretches her arm back to touch him,
his bed-warmed skin;
expecting the familiar response,
his finger down her backbone.
Touching marble; taut, cold;
her brain struggling to climb
to her hand’s discovery;
and turn; can she?
Morning.
It was a morning she knew might come
but the indifference of the stone shocked her;
turn; there is never a choice;
mercifully, his eyes were shut.
Seeds in June, nonchalantly,
like tourists
flying on the south-westerlies,
dawdling
where snowflakes in January
were hustled along
or the mists that spent days
‒ like looped film ‒
throwing shawls
over mountains’ shoulders.
Swallows plane lush lanes,
green larders;
later sycamore helicopters
flicker down
those same corridors
or thud, the crab apples
escaping with their summer’s booty;
globes of pinhead lights:
fruit flies in pools of sun.
The spume cutting loose
from the waves
in Winter storms,
Guinness head rolling up the beach.
Aimless flight of gulls
in the high winds
chipped off the cliff-face;
above the houses, curdled cloud,
charcoal crows,
disturbed people.
When to give up? An edited version of a oem from some years back.
The Salmon in the Spring, the Hazel and the Hermit
Into an open gob the hazelnuts fell,
so that over the years the salmon grew
into a colossus.
A day came when one nut fell plumb-line;
devoured complete with husk
at the very instant of its dimpling the surface,
it caused the salmon to spew from its intestines
the knowledge of a thousand years
that cascaded downhill
over the shilling bright stones,
through the ignorant meadows to the lake,
where it became part of an ever-shifting
circuit of water, weed, spume and silt.
A hermit, who lived by the lake,
dousing his face, drank some of this potion
and was instantly replete.
In time a hazel took root in his belly
and he convulsed
so that the stones unearthed by his flailing feet
filled the lake
and sent its waters flooding out
onto to the plain where the people lived;
so they, too, in their turn, drank;
and by this means knowledge and poetry spread
from the time that was before
to the times now and those yet to come.
That final trespass:
the undertaker preparing her corpse for viewing.
When I knock at the door he all but screams “don’t come in”.
She is now a commodity of the death industry.
Her taut face will hold the appearance of shutters pulled;
life folded neat as she exited.
Everywhere, humans altering the landscape,
not just governmental, but farmers, developers:
ourselves imposing designs on landscapes that
need follow their own evolutions or, as Darwin
might indicate, they become unfit for survival.
And so, the most transitory, those with least
claim to the future, gouging unmercifully through
nature’s processes, which include in their present
their future possibilities, persist in pulling the means
to live from under the feet of their grandchildren.
They talk, panoplies of perception;
Picasso-like profusions.
Tourbillions, the stones’ eyes
as would reflect in Van Gogh’s skies
and mouths: plastic, scream-shaped
as Munch would devise.
Their thoughts run together;
disparate landscapes; maps;
fusions of time and space and dreams;
beyond Einstein.
A woman at a window;
her back to us,
still.
Window in a blank wall,
open
to the sea;
it flows into her:
the bay,
oceans, landmasses,
like air.
She rests,
arms on the window sill.
An updated version of a poem from 2018 that was inspired by Cagall's weightless lovers.
Love made us lighter than air;
we careered, wheeled and banked
above the town.
Time, gravity, all forces;
we were the unifying principle.
Curved like quarter moons,
fitting into each other precisely,
loving each other beyond norms,
we freed ourselves.
In that love nothing hurts;
in that love all is healing.
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In that moment their eyes told everything:
the young woman in love,
the older seeing a young suitor hamming it up.
One smiling, the other concealing laughter;
in that one moment, in their eyes,
see how the broken wheel turns.
Lough Graney
1.
Walking the jetty over the lake;
lying there.
Eternity. A June afternoon
in that place of peace;
no one to disturb you
but yourself
rushing over the water
to be with you,
to complete
your happiness.
2.
This
surface gifts the heavens to you;
I’ve always wondered how you could leave this place;
what finer existence could inveigle you?
Between lake and sky, soul stepping clear of body,
instantly ecstatic; did you imagine there was somewhere
the wings of your heart would find greater span?
Here, where the soft insistence of eternity enters your soul
and time bows to beauty.
This blog compels me to write, without it I don't think I'd have the motivation. Most would think twice about posting their undistilled efforts; I find it helps to get ideas down, later I can come back to work them, and so, I'm re-posting some amended poems from a few years ago.
It does mean I get to look back on quite a few posts that should never have been let out, but I console myself with the thought that even the greatest photgraphers have taken god knows how many average photographs in their quest to capture their most prized images.]
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.
Behind closed eyes:
the sunlit concave of a desert dune
amidst an undulating vastness:
the sun-warmed backs of dreams.
