Homeland

I never knew my homeland

Until I let it lie

Beyond the crowned escarpment

On the river’s brighter side

Give me again the easiness

Of one who does not know

What serves a delimitation

Or where wanderers go

That place that is a childhood

In itself, the world’s own heart

Never lost and never aching

For anything a river apart

Your name

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

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