Poems
To touch death in this manner: if our fingertips could pierce
that airless element, the body
breathing calm within its envelope of gas …
Morning took me to the jetty.
I saw the moon jellyfish pulse toward the air:
as their edges broke that barrier, the briefest spark appeared.
In the clear light of a cloudy summer morning
The idiot boy, holding his father’s hand,
Comes by me on the Quay where I sit writing.
His father spots me looking up, and I don’t want
To look as if I wished I hadn’t, so
Instead of turning straight back to my books
I look around, thus making it a general thing
That I do every so often –
To watch the ferries, to check out the crowd.
So there he was in the library, crouched above the floor
like a mousetrap, squinting into his rickety parallel edition
of the Satires. The paperback was from the late fifties;
Full-Bucket Moon
by Ross Clark
for Ted Kooser
I put away my eyes for the night.
I forget dreams,
perhaps I don’t have them any more,
not close at hand.
I’m not book-sick from the gloomy others.
I haven’t read a word in years.
In me, drink-nettles – I’ve a glass with the same stings,
and ice which comes out as clear sweat on
this side of my skin,
the right-way-up for drying.
... (read more)‘I wonder this wall can bear the weight of such words’
Graffiti on a wall in Pompeii
Blessings and praise
to the dark entanglement of caught branches
I continue to see,
after years of crossing the causeway,
as a black swan
holding her place in the current, her head
held resolute and serene,
her cygnets the shadows that advance and recede
in the eddies she makes going nowhere.
... (read more)daily toil in the fields of light.
They never question our wishes.
They can fail, but not misunderstand.
They are our strangeness that we are blind to.
At night they lie like maimed spiders
or star fish swept to shore. They know
about love as much as mouths and eyes.
Throughout the day, they give the mouth ... (read more)
Everything happens fast and then goes –
the new movie you were waiting for
that you’ve suddenly just seen, the tunnel
under the harbour that seemed to take forever
now built and grooved by a million trips.
In winter fruit trees bud, shops
are full of summer clothes; only this
mind is slow, still stalling on the same
questions, never getting it, left behind
by life as by some wild-eyed nag
storming down the street, her hoofprints
pasted in the grass.
Welcome to the feast, piccolo pasero,
A feast that never ends, of loyalty and treachery.
Two are sold for a farthing, little sparrow