Thaw                                              

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What you murmur, I drink.

I thirst, you pour.

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You have divined me under rock.

Beneath your snow I sensed a spring.

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A hard passage and, at the issue,

A narrow way.

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Be it a needle’s eye our loves flow through,

So long as they conjoin, I’ll not complain.

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A vein subverts the rock, unbinds the ice.

Winter has gone away.

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Published in Black Bough - Deep Time (volume 2)

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Quite All Right, Thank You                                         

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I take you through the forest’s entanglements

till it releases us into this glade.

Silence enough for a bird’s voice to reach us

from one of the forest’s other rooms.

Palisades of pewter-coloured trees rise around,

stand without moving their heads, but they are

looking down, at your features, holding, in the pool

till I smash them to rocking chaos. Uneasy,

you move away, though I’ve done nothing untoward

− merely uncreated you without a word.

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Published in Black Bough - Deep Time (volume 2)

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Freedom

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The platter of water we came across

beside a back road through the hushed fields

outside Caledon, its surface glassy.

Expecting stillness,

a shock − to feel a pulse

beating beneath that skin.

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Among the emptied-out

–  relinquished farms, decayed estates –

I found the capacity to be

full of deep-rooted power.

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Forthcoming in Black Bough's 'Freedom/ Rapture' edition (2021)

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Trust

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Journaling heart, I read your steady record

Not as a pledge of permanence but a wry reminder

That you’ll let me down one day, your ink run dry.

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Unfazed, you tell me your account will stand, now

And in eternity where I, suffused with story,

Will swim in narrative – each life that ever lived

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An open book: beginning, middle, and an end

That buds unendingly. Isn’t heaven this –

To know and to be known? I’d best be about my work,

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You chide me, for what’s the point of all these days

If not to build a house of love, underway

Here, and there roofed with an answered “Why?”

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Cactus Flower

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By imperceptible degrees, a chaste star

rising above stones.   

                                           

I knew you loved me.                                                                 

Something in me spoke to your buried youth. 

Your weathered asperity                                   

was shouldered aside                                                              

by imperceptible degrees…                                                   

Bruiseable again, you looked into me;          

saw yourself,

tenderly.         

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Skin-Song

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I am the rune-bearer sent to a blind queen.

I cannot speak; she cannot see

So I run her fingers over each notch and whorl,

Willing her to take the message in.

She merely laughs, bids me return with something tellable.

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But I am charged.

I string my hips with cameos

And fasten anklets of impressive symmetry,

With subtle intaglios grace each elbow

And in the hollows of my back and knees

I set a lover’s token, feelable.

I climb into her lap. Am spurned.

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I take her to an earldom

Pitted with lava lakes

Where, in the sulphurous, pressured air,

She grasps

Something.

Will she intuit our exhausted State

Or send me back

To the fate of every thwarted messenger?

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To the Mapper of Holy Wells and Springs

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The question that running water asks

         −       pools hold its gaze, reflecting, and rocks,

                   under the frost’s advice, consider

                      its crystallizing, night after winter night      –

you are right to believe it must be listened for;

right to condemn our mania for dogma.

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Expert attendant, steady yourself.

Brim. Hear. Say, ‘Yes’.

 

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Craft

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The blackbird is sewing in the rockery,

his yellow treadle-needle beak

at work precisely in the gravel.             

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I am embroidering −

pierce, pull through, then up

and down again across this lawn.

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Both of us are seeding

but he is stitching Spring.

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Moon, Landing (20th July 1969 )     

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I was moon-hungry, ten years old,

So I set a mirror on the beach

And lay in wait that night.

Moon landed there, looked up

And was a child! Like me, an only child,

Tentative and curious, hoping to play.

To have him as my friend, I saw

I’d have to let him go

And come at will. Chastened, I prayed

That all the astronauts would lose their appetites.

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Published in Black Bough - Issue 2 (Apollo 11 edition)

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