~~~~~~~~
BREAKAGES
FEBRUARY DAWN
A February dawn is like a woman sleeping late,
who stirs and pulls the bedclothes straight
and treads about the trees wearily without the sun;
who wonders, should it have begun....or ended?
It was all the same.
She did not even know his name:
slipshod Dawn with a tired face.
THE DREAM
I dreamed I saw you sitting at the world’s end
still waiting for a word.
I dreamed I lay with lips of stone
that could not call across infinity.
I dreamed I heard you heave a sigh
which echoed like a wind around the world,
as I still lay with limbs and lips of stone
that could not crawl or call you to my side.
I dreamed I died.
BREAKAGE
I dreamed my heart was lying on a slab
in a lab.
That you’d smiled and held a cup
as you watched me cough it up,
and taken it away to preserve it from decay
in the lab.
I touched it on the slab and it felt
as hard as oak.
Then it broke.
THE FINAL PIECE
Your soul was so brittle I dreamed it broke
and danced into the corners of the room.
You found the fragments, save the final piece,
so, flinging the windows wide,
you searched all night in the wind-drunk dust,
until your strength was spent, the piece unfound.
Reach down gently to your windy depths.
There is the fragment that did not join the dance;
the soft and soundless essence of yourself;
waiting as you wrestle with the sky
and stride through startled leaves
like a wind without the dignity to die.
Back to Table of Contents
BENEATH THE BED
Don’t leave those broken pieces on the floor.
Someone might see them.
Like the cleaning woman when she comes at nine.
She looks forward to her chat with you, you say
and she does a thorough job.
But she doesn’t see beneath the bed, the fragments of your
fear collecting dust.
GHOST GIRL
I have transcribed the language of your eyes.
Now turn them on some ghost girl I can’t see;
whose shadow you can catch and coax and free.
And mine will slowly fade, you’ll see,
as yours darts softly at her heels.
FEAR
He asked for evidence.
They gave him platitudes that sung too clear.
He sought a sleeping soul that urged him wait.
He waited and the aching edges spread
into his face cold hands of hate.
He fought until he halted in despair,
and wondered at the sharpness in his cry
when all he found was fear.
THE GHOSTS
The souls that timorously trod
or paused to grope, not daring to delay
in case committal was not bearable,
pass in pale procession.
Ghosts that bear abstractions like a chain.
Dignity and love,
sustained elation and the palest ghost, of peace.
They move like possibilities;
conscious of their paleness in the dark, knowing
those that remain are darker in the dawn.
Until, among the white and waiting ranks
they too must meet and mourn.
SPRING
The spirit moves which time cannot outpace
and we cannot erase the untried possibility.
But the dead outpace the living,
shuffling phantom feet through our deficiencies
and murmuring of a wisdom found too late.
They people this deception; call it spring,
where wanton blood and birds still sing
and skim the shadowed seas.
Shadows are the shades
that watch our wasting in the sun.
See, the dead are walking in the trees.
Back to Table of Contents
DISILLUSION
The groundless image is deposed
yet grows into a grave, more desperate ghost.
Shadow cast upon the path of plausibility
becomes coarse laughter flying in the face of stars.
THE FLOWER
I dare not touch the flower in case it folds.
I’ll hold it to the first grey light of dawn
and see if it fades like all the other tricks of time.
THE SHADOW
Between the idea and the reality
falls the shadow.
So Eliot knew that desecrating god
who, being soulless, steals those, unsuspecting at the point of love.
I grappled with this god,
whose spirit ushers wishes through the dark
to some demented wasteland close to death
and leaves the broken bones of love
to whiten in the light of his mad moon.
I retreated to the way that runs through walls.
But through the walls the lost light plays
around the haunted bed and sad obsession of unspoken love.
Memory is as monstrous, even if the god is dead,
and I heed the disproportionate growth that mocks
mere images of men.
Back to Table of Contents
IN MIDDLE AGE
The woman in the shallows
is howling at the moon and waits
upon the sea’s slow surge for
the washing of the dead about her feet.
DARK WILL
There should be a time of silence between us.
For conscious wills are made of words
exchanged across a barren space.
There should be a time of stillness when we’re closest,
for we cannot know our will while out of touch.
And there is another will:
The dark will without words,
which should bring us together or place us apart -
TO LEE BY THE RIVER
Dampness; an allusion here;
indifference.
Because the soul eludes definition
and flowers in a silent season.
Yet within its dark evasion
lies the essence of cohesion;
the element of touch; indefinable
and demanding far too much….
Apology for failing to comply?
Not likely to remove
indifference; soul’s dampness after love.
Back to Table of Contents
IN RETROSPECT
He appeared as
dark music in reluctant depths without expression.
Slow counterpoint
woven in words of cold regression.
Unphrased
and unaccompanied throughout my brief digression.
THE SLIM BLUE LINE
The slim blue line of justice
leans into the years,
condemning
the beautiful who will not be fulfilled,
the plain, whose souls the commonplace has killed,
the ambitious, devoured by their vocation,
the indolent by lack of exploration.
All is weighed and silently divided,
so similar successors are provided
with a fair initiation.
Condemned too are the gentle, through excess of latitude
and the analytic artist for achieved exactitude.
The line leans indelibly;
a blue dye cast.
&
nbsp; Condemning with a future
unheeded in the past.
Back to Table of Contents
A SILENT CENSURE
A silent censure
rests on roofs in reprehension
of the day’s assumptions.
Confirming:
since the form of truth in every view is different,
the most we may achieve
is acceptance unconcerned
with the striving for conclusion;
reduced to folly with the death of day.
And most of all, a fearless sense of wonder
on the way.
DROWNED
In our disintegration lies our whole;
a soul with silent tears running
like rain - the universal tears
falling
on people; pale water ghosts
washing with the river, rising to the rain
and rain and river flowing to the sea.
Our soul is lost.
Separate we shared its sorrow
and were strong, although we wept and did not speak.
We voiced our fears
and drowned.
URD
From air spun by a secret hand
she steps and sighs for man.
Her chain up which the foolish creatures crawl
uncoils.
She strikes, deprives, embellishes, restores.
Within her beauty lie the deathly shards.
The hand beneath the face that glows with grace
deals destinies like careless cards.
Back to Table of Contents
PERSIAN ROSE
Yellow Persian rose;
multi-petalled in repose
when you chose to bloom.
But mystic, inward living;
your rectitude a thin defence
against the gift of giving.
Like you, love; soft potential in repose
when you chose to give.
But wary and restrained during the giving;
your fear unfounded and a dead defence
against the gifts brought by the living.
THE BUTTERFLIES
Today is dismal. Hindered hopes,
delirious dreams;
dishevelled and distraught
They had fluttered bravely;
bright pennants of illusion
doomed to die.
But see them stir -
their wings restored;
a whirr of wilful hope.
They have not learned
tomorrow will become a sad today.
For now they mass
to move into the present
and a final soft, unsung demise.
Back to Table of Contents
ILLUSION
The glass shards shatter
to a dancing dust.
The woman in a world without reflections
feels her face.
It was her fortune. It had brought her flowers.
She cannot see the fear that fills her eyes
or the surreptitious tampering of time.
She will not witness wily wisdom nudge aside the dream.
Memory is a monster in the dark.
The ice pool spawns reflections, flanked by flowers.
The kneeling woman sees her face unchanged;
illusion of a narcissistic will,
transfixed through deprivation in the dark.
She cannot see the face that brought her fame
fading with the flowers that die
and glide like flesh on fallen flesh.
ALONE
He says, “I love you Eve.”
But, knowing she has sinned
wills, in his mind, the serpent at her throat.
She hones deception to a harmless smile
that leaps like salt in an open wound.
He says, “Don’t go. I’m yours, you know.”
She sleeps,
while he sees, in his mind, the other man
and how the serpent seizes flesh from bone; her smile extinguished
as he walks away. Alone.
Back to Table of Contents