Over Sixty

New observations of inconsistency
And omissions, all part of you
Like the words you mispronounce or omit to say,
Or other words in-between what you meant
Being substituted by error, thinking again
Over slow surreptitious memories
That arise with intuitive fear
For what may come soon, or
Suddenly come under the brute polish of night.
Neon-struck in your head,
Not an awe-ounce of the new daybreak in you,
You suck tubes like blowing glass
To turn fixtures in molten agonies
Of bright gluey pleasure;
Your brightly burning mirrorless flesh
In antipathy, primordial and erect,
Twitching with divinity;
Undressed, you need no law of fact
Or totems of honesty to love;
Each breath calls your life into new organic junctures
Of flickering chromatic knowledge –
Lights off, sounds billing the walls
And shadows of proto-pyric nature
Coating retinas, bloodletting in the capillaries,
Dilating into one egregious, lost, big bloom.

Failure

What may speaketh may speaketh as it may
As day ascends on night’s unrushed forray
With early a red vanquish setting clouds
That bringeth burnt clarity to noon’s word
But no shadow bent o’er poppy fields due
Which mid-autumn’s unpacked harvest yields now
Nor Winter growing old in summer, ne’er
Left idle, the celestial conscience –
None can thus neglect, circumstance forget
As with a mirror’s unyielding transience:
He placeth his asterisk in the e’en sky;
Ye, buries roots, life’s growth to reach it try.

In the Garden

The shadow of a tree
Catches a groom of breeze;
We lie still in a room
Listening to what it says.

Listen, we’re dead! it says.
Those of us here in our beds
Lying through our lips
With prayers in our head.

The shadow of a breeze,
The chapel-goers in holy praise
Remember the catechism of trees
Now barren, of leafless days.

One Season

The wine you’re pouring.

The vine-leaf reined in,
Such dead monogamy
In the drying season.

In Winter’s pedigree,
All the cold way
Through packed streets.

Then Spring’s neon rays,
With deepened heat
Trees budding, tapping.

Branches and roots,
Antennae flowering
All brightened out.

Malls

Their faces are the soft focus of shadowy,
Life that, untouched, asks if you are alright;
You are unsure, if the weight of your arm
Is you rising or being lifted –
This has happened before.

Public places like malls can be clinically
Unforgiving. I realise the sick are unwelcome here.
The old are not here. They understood sooner
Than I did.

My focus gone, my flesh hangs cold
From the heart;
When I reach the seat I rest, the bag wherewithal,
And I start to press the periphery of each eye toward
A centre point – where life’s oblique onset is,
But there’s a vageness, like a memory that has changed.

The first images of the city outside
Are fresh and its neon transience intense.
I hold myself – an image there,
A stamped version of some misdirected moment
As when the brain is released from its rapid function
At night, subsiding ..
I listen for what will happen next;

The slipping out like a foaling birth
That welcomes your unbridled limbs,
Coils you into an autonomous form
Of unending life.

There you go again.

Closeby

No nearer to what to say
We lie with still affection;
South the clouds go by
Passing without detection.

O, how willing you remain
Inside those sun-brown eyes,
I’m seeing how you’ve grown
By each militant degree

Of love.
Leave it all,
Lie here quietly. There’s
Noonfall rain expected;
It will last years.

Summering

Holy is the heat
The high fellowship of rain

Comes on

The garden reeks of souls that are dead

This old stadium is filled with mourners crowded on its seats
I watch them jubilant run its tracks
Strange god-figureheads on the flags of nations
Loosely caper and thread the wind

The sun, a mnemonic beat, prays like a
Charlatan rose-bearer down on the riverbanks

To cut blood
Loudspeakers wail, of obituaries
They make, worsted of sound, and good for feeding pigeons

Who says? – a popular t-shirt says
Dust is come
Dust of the earth
Dust of frustrated time
It pillages the crevices of my face
Like a swarm of minor insects

The whole extinct wardrobe of nature is buried somewhere
It has been underground a billion years with intact life
But cannot be found now

Hands that once held you in friendship are gone
The sound of song is at rest
Our only living bequest
The last memory of guttered butterflies

Articles of faith

On the oak’s enlarged and sterile bark

Ripe mid-year’s mellow heat is already tawning leaf

But the tree stands, adamant and green in the park;

A bending shadow moves it on the path,

This continent of tree.

Moving slowly through armoured life,

Never grown old until now,

Nakedly and intently

Its body’s organisms inalienable things

Bent from the wands of spring’s yielding wind,

So solemnly goes its way into ended night.

Now it sheds its further growth and grows blind.

Now it loses some sense of the river and the voice.

Now with enclaves rising up,

A whole earth close to a falsifying error,

If the oak only listens

It can earn our hope;

Hope, a bat-light thing that runs wildly

Out from the sun’s blight air.

Molly

My great aunt, meal-in-mouth for wanting,
Mottled in tweed, muffled in fur,
With a rabbit’s foot for luck
And a mink her favoured almanac
Round her neck. Molly, too dear;
I can miss her wood-burning, dog-cheer
Days; poker between barred heat
Up and drying my wool and wet scarf.
How far to see the shadows of the park
The scent of the morning’s scratched bark,
When we went dog-fetching with Toto
Clinging his chain and black earnestness
Round the still, poised monuments,
And further down the flitching current
Of the river, always unable to imagine
The future, of your perpetual ending.
Molly, in your coat, you go
Ahead along the path and through
The singing gate that revolves
On an unoiled hinge that never loved anything,
Or never found it.

Bone stories

Abutted bone; you can see from the high loft of mediated sky
The spine of a range and when you fly at that altitude
A hundred crested waves of migrant birds below
That into a trembling blue horizon
Fly off in their medley
Over land, and lake, and cutting through itinerant
Idioms of each new landscape,
The patterns cross your sight –
You see from the window seat the reckoning miles below
From the eyes of an upright mammal sitting erect,
As you – canned-in – course, glide over glotches of nested buildings;
Too high to see the great elm tree at the garden’s end that you would have sighted
If in the course of the flight you went that way, but now – regardless –
Speculating from the vertical distance to it, with a view of a
Solitary gesture over the grand open lands – space –
Meanwhile, somewhere in the north where the grasses aren’t cut
From the scathing cold winds, where an aboriginal home
Is still wingless, home to the airborne fowl
Arriving south;
A ‘south’ far from the empty
Iteration of snow and freezing mercies of the pure north;
This is a placated version of your arrival
When you’ve finally stepped off the gangplanks
Into air that borders nowhere,
Into the waste you’ve hidden in yourself for years –
Drone still and hard on bone.