Small Things
acted out, been home
to birds, and used by children
as a ship or horse
or castle tower.
Through frosted panes
and summer’s blaze
I’d watched your
billowed form unfold.
I knew your shape,
I’d studied idly all the
upward and the downward
slopes of your thick limbs.
You were familiar,
your form still there
when eyes were closed.
The world around you
seemed more safe
for your firm presence.
You were rock,
but you were also life.
One night a blast of wind
too strong for your old roots
had toppled you, and laid you
prostrate and undignified,
like some old aunt who’s fainted,
arms awry and dress thrown up.
It happened in the hours of darkness
when no-one was around to see you go.
You fell, and that was it;
there was no resurrection,
no reprieve.
You lay there in the turmoil
of your broken limbs
without complaint
as saws were taken to your flesh
and your vast mass reduced
to dust and fragrant emptiness.
I gazed at where for my whole life
you’d stood so steadfast,
and saw instead the winter sky
and wheeling birds.
Your presence had defined
for me the shape
of gentleness and power,
and for a while at least,
the space you left
was the emptiest space I knew.
AMBER
On warm nights happiness, it seems,
is unavoidable, sinking into blood and bone
as easily as slow sad songs.
Breathe it in, believe it;
for a while at least
all the words we speak make sense;
we give each one its moment
and its place,
and fog the air with sighs
and languorous thoughts.
I love the smell of candlelight
and ruby wine.
Our laughter calls down moths
and moonlight to our table.
All is well.
But more than this;
in memory we store away
our amber hours,
knowing that on frosty nights
all the honey of our lives
is liquid still.
BOOK
Miraculous object, hidden world,
that opened shell from whose plain shape
the whole Earth rises!
How easily, with so few marks, the crucible
is lit, the seed bed laid, and distant lands
made manifest in simple words!
Alphabets and ordered lines conduct us
down their well laid paths, with each
a highway to a human tale.
A thousand times it can be told,
and with each reading
another life is fed and watered
and set off down that winding lane
to find significance where none exists
unless we put it there.
THE HAUNTED HEART
Women have been my constant longing,
equal to the pull of tides,
the yearning of the lungs for air.
Into each cell the open arms
of women reach, and bring to life
in every breath
the power of water and of flame,
that soft collision
born in flesh and breath and words,
a touch and taste
that lingers in the blood like fire,
is etched on bone;
the centre and the sanctuary.
And from this furnace
fire consumes the haunted heart,
and pours its light into my dark,
illuminates the act of living.
Fire is quenched by the water it heats;
the shore destroys the waves
which erode it. Flesh must unite;
only life can keep us from dying.
ROLL THE DICE
Perhaps because we know
our numbers, one to ten,
we care to think that fate too
functions to this scheme,
but the heavens rather
have a different map
where souls are tossed about
by torrid winds,
and where we touch
is all we’ll ever know.
The world is neither cruel nor kind,
but randomly it mixes us
with love and loss,
and builds its constructs
to another plan, not ours.
And yet we live and must make
choices every day; we are both
pawns and players in this game.
So roll the dice and deal the cards
and let us have our play.
MUSEUM PIECE
It came from the soil,
a thing of stone,
a dormant messenger returned
to this new light.
A shovel
ringing on its pale proud face
unearthed the same expression
which had lain unblinking
through its dusty sleep.
Godlike it had rested
through tumultuous years
whilst under azure skies
whole kingdoms rose and fell.
It slid away, abandoned
to a lovelessness as dark and deep
as oceans.
Now in this stark room
Apollo lingers on a foreign plinth.
His battles all are fought.
No longer does his name elicit
fear or love; he is,
in this frail fragment,
a voice remote as seashores
in a lonely shell.
Yet what remains becomes the whole;
through marble lips the words still seep:
in every way that mankind has,
his nature never changes.
LETTERS
Because they came from you,
words which long ago
had ceased to sound,
words I’d heard a thousand times,
now ring afresh,
as bright as bells on frosty air.
Your fingers too are precious to me,
moving as they do, the ink
which lets what lingers in your heart
go free.
Soundless are the words you send me,
as quiet as apples on a bough,
yet each is full and ripe with life
as life allows.
I love you naked,
spread out on the page
as sheer as wet silk
stretched across a dimpled brow.
I wish, oh how I wish,
that raised up to my face
your page would give me trace
of your sweet skin.
OMNES EODEM COGIMUR *
For what great purpose
does a tulip stand
and open up its heart
to sun and wind?
Each one has staked its claim
in rooted earth,
and thrust up to fulfilment
in the age old way.
Year on year the fight goes on,
the game is played,
and every time it ends the same,
not with the chance of a better life,
but in the molecules of marvellous dust,
the very bricks from which we’re made.
* We are all on a journey to the same place ~ Horace
IT BEGAN WITH BIRDS
It
began with birds,
a trickle in the ice dark,
those voices
threaded through the dreamland,
wordless
but alive and busy
as a tumbling stream.
Only later
did the songs make sense
when, searching
through the furniture
of clumsy words,
I found a space
the shape
of all that’s lacking.
The smell of rain
lives in that place,
as does the red of blood,
the movement
of the summer grass.
It is the vacancy
where once a lover stood
in melancholy autumn smoke.
The dark holds secrets
that the light destroys,
and all we love
and wish to keep
we must let go.
WHERE WILL YOU FIND ME?
Where will you find me?
In what do I exist?
Am I hidden in hunger and thirst,
in need and desire? Am I defined
by the reach of my senses?
Or am I made only of numbers and words?
Like the tail of a comet my cells have departed.
The flesh I was born with left long ago;
I am no more that child
than my lawn is the grass
that was laid with the turf.
I am lines and scars and imprints on others,
a succession of acts, an outline in air.
I am muddle and struggle,
I am habits and prejudice.
I am shaped like the rock
that’s been worn by the waves;
what I’ve done repeatedly
I have become.
LATE
Night had fallen
when I reached your home
that final time.
All looked unchanged
along the quiet shoreline road.
The moon and stars
both played their part
on soft salt air,
as did the sibilance of waves,
and further out,
the unseen dark immensity
of water.
Always at this point
some feeling of arrival
eased me down
those few stone steps
towards the lighted window
and that one place
in the world
that never would reject me.
But not this time.
That last night
in your home, alone,
without you,
I lay and listened
to a silence steeped
in your departed presence.
Patterns on the curtains
spoke your name,
and in the odour
of fresh linen
that you’d washed
I saw you once again
as you’d once been.
The hours bled away
till dawn which,
when it came,
creeping down the wall
that fresh clear day,
would see me rise
and wash
and take my leave,
never to return.
NEW LIFE
Out of all creation
came this being,
where each child,
like the greening bud
on some vast tree,
is their own season’s blooming
of an ancient life.
The same old words
have worked their way
into our mouths,
each generation
holding them
as dear and apt
as did the last,
for each new life
calls forth from us
the inextinguishable,
and opens up a new path
to the heart.
And love walks in.
BECAUSE HE’D WAITED
Because he’d waited,
because he’d stood
where stillness
seeps inside the bones,
eased in like sleep,
slowly over many years
he’d found on quiet station platforms,
touched by rain and frost and sun,
a pathway to a hidden world.
In litter, weeds and passing birds
he’d glimpsed the silence and the sound.
In small things, private in their undertakings,
all the laws of physics held their course:
the blast of gales upon his neck,
the singing of the iron rails
brought him to now,
for over all those years,
poised between two places –
left behind and yet to come –
all his senses burgeoned
like tight twists of paper in a pool.
Awakened to this other world
on quiet platforms,
he'd breathed and learned that,
unlike trains,
life can never be delayed.
NIGHT AFTER NIGHT
For a long time now
the trees have capped the lone grey hill.
Patiently the Earth unfolds;
no rush of days
but over centuries the story’s told.
Countless lives
were witnessed by the patient moon,
and in their day
blew bold as storms
now swept away till all that’s left
lies buried in sad words.
The eyelids of the day now close,
and in the trees the voices
of the rooks draw darkness down.
On every blade of grass
a fresh dew forms
and glitters in the silent fields.
Night after night the Earth exhales.
All settles now; we sleep, we fade,
whilst in the dark,
immense, alone,
the hill endures.
APARTMENT BLOCK
There are people
whose names
I do not know,
but whose faces
are like the many faces
of moons or flowers.
I have seen them,
each at their window,
each in their world,
like the pictures
on a sheet of stamps,
a gallery of souls.
And in each space,
cell-like,
busy with its own needs,
fears and aspirations,
a life as real as mine
performs,
whilst around it
in the darkness
of the murmuring city
unseen, unknown,
but as numerous
as stars,
the lives of others
swarm.
OLD BEAST
Black flows the river on November days,
a slow dark presence in the town,
whose body, gorged on slanting rains,
draws in the pastures of the sky,
the memory of moss and peat and vivid winds.
It moves but stays –
this night-deep funeral of gathered waters –
familiar as sound and air
that slides by dreamlike
under hollow bridges.
No boats today, only the fallen leaves
which spiral as sad dancers do
towards the end, suspended
for a time by grace and resignation.
Soon the brittle nights will come,
the stippling rains,
the cold hard breath of meagre days.
But on it flows, an old beast
moving to a different scheme,
not that of years,
but measured out in silent stone,
forgotten forests lost to dust and fertile emptiness.
Pass on, old beast,
and find your time-worn path
like music threaded through a dreary day,
till you dissolve at last
into the boundless
and the everlasting sea.
TREASURE
Padauk, lignum vitae, massaranduba.
His mouth forms the words
as his calloused hands reach
to caress the timber.
He calls out their names
like intimate friends:
pau marfim, zebrano, pernambuco.
Like a wine connoisseur
with his dusty green bottles,
he worships the promise
of a hidden interior.
On shelves and in boxes
his samples of wood
are gathered to wait.
They are jewels,
rare birds, organic treasures,
a symbiotic pairing with man
who, with his tools,
will split and shape
and release a beauty
which did not exist.
He knows the story;
its voice is the chainsaw,
the slow crashing arc
of toppling trees,
and with them the forests,
the breath of the world.
But he cannot relinquish
this tropical passion,
these spirits of the soil
patterned like lace,
like watered silk,
bright as fish scales,
as pearl in the sun.
It’s an age old dilemma,
for what can he make
that having made it
will justify
the use of such wood?
Amaranth, palisander, Indian ebony.
For the time being now
he prefers the potential
of mellowing boards
and billets and blocks.
He breathes in their odour.
One day, he thinks…
Two years from now,
on a cold winter day
when clearing his house,
his executors burn it.
It gives little warmth.
Cocobolo, wenge, curapay, muninga
OLD FRIEND
When, as a child,
my bed was a ship
on a storm-tossed sea,
I did not thank it.
As a cave,
as an island,
as a landscape
criss-crossed
by valleys and plains
it received no thanks.
For a bed is a bed.
I entered this world
spilled out onto sheets,
and remained there
safe in my bed’s
cupped hands,
sleeping the sleep
of an untroubled mind
till my legs
at last woke.
But each night
I returned
to gather my dreams,