Poems
Three hours out from Heathrow
After a dinner party once
you stilled my hand
Don't blow out a candle
my brother is a sailor
Above the dark blank Baltic
I thought of him
The lonely sweep from a lightship
three hours out from Heathrow
And as the plane descended
I struggled ears filled as if with water
and clutched the landing card
as all the lights of London blazed
Such a beautiful morning.
when the sun rose on the raw fabric of the world
water-marked flesh curled in its own drowned weight
now broken up and reassembled
it rose on the flotsam of bodies
adrift in a two way mirror of consciousness
isolated between translucence and reflection
on ribcage and skull still attempting futile protection
:the failing heart, the final momentary sun
that mirror blaze, that is the signature of thought
it rose over a now unrecognisable landscape
of collective incomplete figures
and their illogically substituted limbs
on seaglass sea, sun sharp and bright
engulfing pain along a line of nerve
in its steep undersea preoccupation
Such a beautiful morning
clear and afterwards calm
when the sun did rise and its light did stab
landfall
that sudden unexpected glimpse
as you look into a mirror
and expecting to see your self
look into emptiness
here the silvered distance
from my world's end to beginning
charted by hemispheres of the skull
or the heart's unsafe harbour
an illusory figure sails
sightless (just off frame)
no promise of the infinite
or landfall beyond
instead a shape of air
sailing deceptive water
Other's sleep
It is a dark
Shared with my lover's son.
A high plain
Scaffolded with prayer flags
Quiet as on a field of battle
Yet to be commenced.
Thin fabric fluttering
on spindly poles. The shuffling
of others as they shift position under
our endless forest. So many prayers.
We raise aloft our tallest
dreams to face this merest breath of wind.
(The past was easier to forsee
my earliest memory a rainshower
through sunlight. Monkey wedding.)
How can the dreams of these wakeful
nights be interpreted? Others sleep.
We await the dawn.
Measure
A crossroads if you will - complicit
between the physical and the emotional
There in the sensuality of the eye
a flood of colour. We steady ourselves
regain balance in the give and take
of breath
Wave after wave exhaling
until all is washed clean
Head cradled against fishing rods
the run of line
leaded with weights to its barbed hook
finally trusting emptiness. We pack down tight
in the belly of the car ferry
Truth now lies in memory
a return from the Zen practice
of being
unflinching at the beach
under the endless gaze of sky