Where is the name
By which I called you
Why does the forsythia
Lie heavy, in winter’s wake
As if yearning for
Its sleep
Category: Poems
A spring too late
If I could step so lightly
I would go to you
Where the gods
Cross drifting leaves
To walk with
Only think of how I could make you again
In roses’ roots and the last atoms’ rays
In salt, the colours un-fading
Back to what they were
In the wildest farthest of days
Step from your dead ivory seat
To the bedrock, wet and gleaming
And if you walk to me
By Arjuna’s arrow you’ll see
Our thousand worlds above the reef
Denser text
Give me not what lighter meaning
Would happily bestow; the locks and transitives
Lead us but one way superseding
The wheels and wings and charged crossings
The empty spaces freely wandering
And all that was our blood’s first beating
Before ink and logic’s anchor sunk below
The pages folding ever thinner
And yet their bounds redoubling, stronger
Their weight, a snarled infinity in lignin round
So give me not the free words flying
The are the means unbound and will undying
No false simplicity as it came before
But eat and speak as we are given
The parenthetical a trench as surely
As we read, and could no more go erring
Though laughter still would leave us dreaming
Or the bee in blue-bright autumn fell to ground
Sanctuary
What hold the lights,
What hold the sounds –
What silence scares me so
I ask nothing more than seeming
Mooring against the undertow
The land we knew
The land we forgot
Has never been and never will
And we carve ourselves poor crevices
Paste where glass once glowed
Only let me keep the stories
That can never be my own
The laughter of a dozen strangers
The comfort of a kingly home
What hold the light,
What hold the sounds
But a papery sanctuary
Against a sea long lost in changing
And the charts that sinking go
Where naught was left
Where naught was left I stayed and sat
And remembered enough for two
Without past there is no present
And the future splits in two
You were there, yet naught was left
And but for the sounds and sighs
I might have been alone in that room
With no cause to bow and cry
Dimly lit
Only let me dip
Always, always
My cheek to your shoulder
My head to your neck
The night comes early and
The cupboards are barren
A blank clockface
No longer moving
Only stay, stay
Where the smells of yesterday
Linger longest
*
2020
Side by side apart
Love is always
The light piercing the rain
The heart’s worn-out refrain
My pillow
At the end of the day
Somewhere past Cornwall
“Send her to the whippershpon”
Said the cat beneath the peas
Batting white and purple blossoms
Jupiter passing on the breeze
“We don’t need her kind here –
Yarn-cutters and bird-lovers tall –
If Gravity were not fallible
She would not have birthed them all”
Held between the bulldogs
An abundance of meows
Were all that fell from my lips
And I was led off by the snout
The Wind at Cedars
Between moon and sun we sway
Seen from above, a coursing mist
Sand over sand, white over dark
A breath at the end of the day
