In the Eye of the Storm

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  BREAKAGES

  FEBRUARY DAWN

  A February dawn is like a woman sleeping late,

  who stirs and pulls the bedclothes straight

  and treads about the trees wearily without the sun;

  who wonders, should it have begun....or ended?

  It was all the same.

  She did not even know his name:

  slipshod Dawn with a tired face.

  THE DREAM

  I dreamed I saw you sitting at the world’s end

  still waiting for a word.

  I dreamed I lay with lips of stone

  that could not call across infinity.

  I dreamed I heard you heave a sigh

  which echoed like a wind around the world,

  as I still lay with limbs and lips of stone

  that could not crawl or call you to my side.

  I dreamed I died.

  BREAKAGE

  I dreamed my heart was lying on a slab

  in a lab.

  That you’d smiled and held a cup

  as you watched me cough it up,

  and taken it away to preserve it from decay

  in the lab.

  I touched it on the slab and it felt

  as hard as oak.

  Then it broke.

  THE FINAL PIECE

  Your soul was so brittle I dreamed it broke

  and danced into the corners of the room.

  You found the fragments, save the final piece,

  so, flinging the windows wide,

  you searched all night in the wind-drunk dust,

  until your strength was spent, the piece unfound.

  Reach down gently to your windy depths.

  There is the fragment that did not join the dance;

  the soft and soundless essence of yourself;

  waiting as you wrestle with the sky

  and stride through startled leaves

  like a wind without the dignity to die.

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  BENEATH THE BED

  Don’t leave those broken pieces on the floor.

  Someone might see them.

  Like the cleaning woman when she comes at nine.

  She looks forward to her chat with you, you say

  and she does a thorough job.

  But she doesn’t see beneath the bed, the fragments of your

  fear collecting dust.

  GHOST GIRL

  I have transcribed the language of your eyes.

  Now turn them on some ghost girl I can’t see;

  whose shadow you can catch and coax and free.

  And mine will slowly fade, you’ll see,

  as yours darts softly at her heels.

  FEAR

  He asked for evidence.

  They gave him platitudes that sung too clear.

  He sought a sleeping soul that urged him wait.

  He waited and the aching edges spread

  into his face cold hands of hate.

  He fought until he halted in despair,

  and wondered at the sharpness in his cry

  when all he found was fear.

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  THE GHOSTS

  The souls that timorously trod

  or paused to grope, not daring to delay

  in case committal was not bearable,

  pass in pale procession.

  Ghosts that bear abstractions like a chain.

  Dignity and love,

  sustained elation and the palest ghost, of peace.

  They move like possibilities;

  conscious of their paleness in the dark, knowing

  those that remain are darker in the dawn.

  Until, among the white and waiting ranks

  they too must meet and mourn.

  SPRING

  The spirit moves which time cannot outpace

  and we cannot erase the untried possibility.

  But the dead outpace the living,

  shuffling phantom feet through our deficiencies

  and murmuring of a wisdom found too late.

  They people this deception; call it spring,

  where wanton blood and birds still sing

  and skim the shadowed seas.

  Shadows are the shades

  that watch our wasting in the sun.

  See, the dead are walking in the trees.

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  DISILLUSION

  The groundless image is deposed

  yet grows into a grave, more desperate ghost.

  Shadow cast upon the path of plausibility

  becomes coarse laughter flying in the face of stars.

  THE FLOWER

  I dare not touch the flower in case it folds.

  I’ll hold it to the first grey light of dawn

  and see if it fades like all the other tricks of time.

  THE SHADOW

  Between the idea and the reality

  falls the shadow.

  So Eliot knew that desecrating god

  who, being soulless, steals those, unsuspecting at the point of love.

  I grappled with this god,

  whose spirit ushers wishes through the dark

  to some demented wasteland close to death

  and leaves the broken bones of love

  to whiten in the light of his mad moon.

  I retreated to the way that runs through walls.

  But through the walls the lost light plays

  around the haunted bed and sad obsession of unspoken love.

  Memory is as monstrous, even if the god is dead,

  and I heed the disproportionate growth that mocks

  mere images of men.

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  IN MIDDLE AGE

  The woman in the shallows

  is howling at the moon and waits

  upon the sea’s slow surge for

  the washing of the dead about her feet.

  DARK WILL

  There should be a time of silence between us.

  For conscious wills are made of words

  exchanged across a barren space.

  There should be a time of stillness when we’re closest,

  for we cannot know our will while out of touch.

  And there is another will:

  The dark will without words,

  which should bring us together or place us apart -

  silently.

  TO LEE BY THE RIVER

  Dampness; an allusion here;

  indifference.

  Because the soul eludes definition

  and flowers in a silent season.

  Yet within its dark evasion

  lies the essence of cohesion;

  the element of touch; indefinable

  and demanding far too much….

  Apology for failing to comply?

  Not likely to remove

  indifference; soul’s dampness after love.

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  IN RETROSPECT

  He appeared as

  dark music in reluctant depths without expression.

  Slow counterpoint

  woven in words of cold regression.

  Unphrased

  and unaccompanied throughout my brief digression.

  THE SLIM BLUE LINE

  The slim blue line of justice

  leans into the years,

  condemning

  the beautiful who will not be fulfilled,

  the plain, whose souls the commonplace has killed,

  the ambitious, devoured by their vocation,

  the indolent by lack of exploration.

  All is weighed and silently divided,

  so similar successors are provided

  with a fair initiation.

  Condemned too are the gentle, through excess of latitude

  and the analytic artist for achieved exactitude.

  The line leans indelibly;

  a blue dye cast.

&
nbsp; Condemning with a future

  unheeded in the past.

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  A SILENT CENSURE

  A silent censure

  rests on roofs in reprehension

  of the day’s assumptions.

  Confirming:

  since the form of truth in every view is different,

  the most we may achieve

  is acceptance unconcerned

  with the striving for conclusion;

  reduced to folly with the death of day.

  And most of all, a fearless sense of wonder

  on the way.

  DROWNED

  In our disintegration lies our whole;

  a soul with silent tears running

  like rain - the universal tears

  falling

  on people; pale water ghosts

  washing with the river, rising to the rain

  and rain and river flowing to the sea.

  Our soul is lost.

  Separate we shared its sorrow

  and were strong, although we wept and did not speak.

  We voiced our fears

  and drowned.

  URD

  From air spun by a secret hand

  she steps and sighs for man.

  Her chain up which the foolish creatures crawl

  uncoils.

  She strikes, deprives, embellishes, restores.

  Within her beauty lie the deathly shards.

  The hand beneath the face that glows with grace

  deals destinies like careless cards.

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  PERSIAN ROSE

  Yellow Persian rose;

  multi-petalled in repose

  when you chose to bloom.

  But mystic, inward living;

  your rectitude a thin defence

  against the gift of giving.

  Like you, love; soft potential in repose

  when you chose to give.

  But wary and restrained during the giving;

  your fear unfounded and a dead defence

  against the gifts brought by the living.

  THE BUTTERFLIES

  Today is dismal. Hindered hopes,

  delirious dreams;

  dishevelled and distraught

  They had fluttered bravely;

  bright pennants of illusion

  doomed to die.

  But see them stir -

  their wings restored;

  a whirr of wilful hope.

  They have not learned

  tomorrow will become a sad today.

  For now they mass

  to move into the present

  and a final soft, unsung demise.

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  ILLUSION

  The glass shards shatter

  to a dancing dust.

  The woman in a world without reflections

  feels her face.

  It was her fortune. It had brought her flowers.

  She cannot see the fear that fills her eyes

  or the surreptitious tampering of time.

  She will not witness wily wisdom nudge aside the dream.

  Memory is a monster in the dark.

  The ice pool spawns reflections, flanked by flowers.

  The kneeling woman sees her face unchanged;

  illusion of a narcissistic will,

  transfixed through deprivation in the dark.

  She cannot see the face that brought her fame

  fading with the flowers that die

  and glide like flesh on fallen flesh.

  ALONE

  He says, “I love you Eve.”

  But, knowing she has sinned

  wills, in his mind, the serpent at her throat.

  She hones deception to a harmless smile

  that leaps like salt in an open wound.

  He says, “Don’t go. I’m yours, you know.”

  She sleeps,

  while he sees, in his mind, the other man

  and how the serpent seizes flesh from bone; her smile extinguished

  as he walks away. Alone.

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