the same hand that sows the stars
trails across the galactic lyre...
the dying wave reaching our lips
as two or three true words.
~~~
My heart's all out of time...
then a tear in the clouds,
the light brightening in its lantern
of sun and rain
the sudden rainbow;
then all of it, inverted, minuscule, in each speck
of rain in her black hair
And I let it slip away again.
~~~
I'd paint you, alone
on the mirror's false depths-
alive to your heart,
dead to your poet.
~~~
So is this magic place to die with us?
I mean that place where memory still holds
the breath of your early life:
the white shadow of first love,
that voice that rose and fell
with your own heart, the hand
you'd dream of closing in your own.
~~~
Do lover's
derangements unstring the days,
cut them free from time?
I know
there was a smile on your lips...
what was it you were offering me?
Time came into fruit, stolen
from the grove? the unplayed time
of some stopped golden evening?
A [black] sun you'd caught, asleep in the river?
~~~
'winter light strained through glass, and clouds, and rain...the clock glitters on the wall...the mindless diamond keeps one spark of the planet's early fires trapped forever in its net of ice'
~~~
a border song to
forgetting, amnesty, oblivion.
Our one concern, now we are a matter of time,
is to perfect the desperate attitude
of our long waiting; but she will not fail to come.
~~~
Between departure times
the properties of our love are spread out
There
the places of the world remain undivided,
not surveyed and not findable
~~~
heard snatches of this conversation whilst scribbling down these notes, fragments:
"I read this, it was good, in a true way."
[Nicholas Cage, said a third person, totally out of the blue]
"Read the first line and see if you can read any more."
you make to get up, place the books back exactly where you found them, like a thief who's lost his nerve, note the time, the hands of the clock at a safe enough distance from one another for you to run and see if they've still got the Casals/Bach Bob recommended. 1950. Strange how you always remember numbers and not faces.
~~~
On the journey in a very fetching 50-ish woman sits opposite you. Very mousey, tall, lean. Not a particularly strong face, but striking nevertheless, and something about her, the intelligence in her eyes, perhaps, reminds you of numbers, of your math teacher at school, Mrs. Griffiths. You guess how many stops you'll be on the same line. Four or five. Doesn't really matter. By the time you come back you'd have forgotten the details, and only remembered the association. You read the lines from the Stoner book: "lust and learning, that's all there really is".
On the way back a black person talks to his girlfriend (?), an American (though she looks Iranian and is wearing some great fake-antique earrings [this makes you sound sicker than you are!])
He talks to her about how the City of London isn't really a city, how it's slightly over 1 square mile in size, (the 'slightly' is unnecessary, uncalled for, and is boring the socks off her, you just know). She puts a brave face on it, feigns interest (man, they're not even married and the girl's on it). He continues in his mind numbing way, as you watch her earrings swing and glint: "Yes, on it's own, in its very own right it's the 7th biggest economy in the world" (come on, come on already, cut to the chase).
She nods. Looks up to him. "I've never been to Wall St." she says, shyly, and laughs, hoping to loosen him up a bit.
"Well, Wall St. is only the 10 th biggest."
Dude, the earring, the earrings.
~~~
I should like these poems read to me, with the doors closed, the light shut out. Just in darkness, the words like a low flame. The poem, 'almost without words', would greet me, sitting on my comfortable chair, and fall away into the evening silence. There's enough there, even amongst the ashes, even surrounded by so many blank spaces; the point is, the quality of the print, the texture, the unsaid, the shape of the whole...you know your books (by their covers).
~~~
the ducks and hens
tread the farmyard to a shitty green
[bear with me, dear reader(s)]
the ducks and hens
tread the farmyard to a shitty green
the smallholders are indoors praying
plaster crumbles off the walls
the little stream meanders
through its soggy meadows
the willow harbours Alexander,
Caesar in the nettle stone
the great names of the world
are at large in the beet-fields,
for all that spiders weave,
and the spitz barks at vagrants
Rats pipe in the cellar
a line of verse skims in the butterfly light
the saps of the world learn to circulate
smoke rises like a fiery poem.
(D.P., and Eich)
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