Poems
A
Water Song
I saw your hand make shapes
to catch the falling rain.
I saw your hand as a cup
under the weight of a waterfall.
I saw your hand slice through
icy waters rushing
away from melting snow.
I have seen your hands washing
soapy water across
the landscape of your body.
I have seen your hands
pulling the sea over you
as you swam at midnight
as though you could
make the sea your home.
You could live under water,
you have the grace, the ease,
the elegance, the poise, the delicacy.
You flow like water running,
you run like water flowing,
and swim through your sleeping dreams.
And when the morning comes
I stand on the shore as you dive
deeper into a life I'll never know.
She was there and dressed in white
I thought, for a time,
she could be a bride,
my bride.
But she is not there for weddings
she is no-one's bride.
She will not be tamed.
She is not there for easy domesticity.
She will not always be there
like the morning
to turn her face towards you
on some warm pillow.
She moves over landscapes
and through forests
along shorelines
and across cliff tops,
always just out of reach,
always beyond your calling.
She moves like a cloud
across the skies of your life.
Beyond touch, she waits
for the world to move around her.
She was there
before history began:
before kings, kingdoms, deeds,
heroes and legends,
myths and long-faded memory.
She walked these green lands
long before the forests fell,
long before the rolling hills.
She will be here
long after your monuments
and domes are forgotten,
long after the last child
dies of its father's disease.
Fogbound
The years fall behind me
and I grow too old to hope
for dreams that are not regrets.
I invent new memories
of what life ought to have been.
I should have been someone else
I should've had a worthwhile life
that created real memories.
I lived a forgettable life.
I arrived here, at nowhere,
a passenger left stranded
on some bare nameless station,
left staring helplessly out
to where the track curls, like smoke,
rising on up out towards
the unreachable horizon.
I could have been a traveller,
I could have been… if only….
If only I'd had the courage
to say goodbye, walk away
instead of just standing there
on a stark winter morning
as she walked away, slowly
across the park, lost inside
a February morning fog
like some invented memory
of a heart-breaking moment.
Solitary
I should have been that solitary man
in an old flat cap and creased, tired mac,
sipping a single slow half-pint of mild
in the back shadows of the public bar;
who does not look up with expectation
at every creak of the opening door;
who strolls back to a solitary bed-sit
to toast one thin-sliced round of cheap white bread
over the thin heat of a one-bar fire
while, on the mantelpiece, his cocoa cools
and the radio whispers the late news.
Eternal
Down here, we let the dust
run through our fingers
as we wait for rain to fall.
We hear voices on the wind
and see stern faces
in the beards of the clouds.
We search for reasons
and find them hidden, encoded
in the world’s secret signs.
The stars tell us stories
as we wait, nervous, for the dawn
to shine meanings on our dreams.
Poised, ready for motion
we begin at the point
where the world ends
around us. We start
where all else ceases.
At the heart of the silence.
The end of eternal torment
torments us.
The end of the horror
of eternal bliss
brings comfort to us.
We wait in empty space
nothing above us
to raise us up.
Nothing below us
to drag us down.
We wait only
for an end to waiting.
Dawn Chorus
I too could rise up hopeful, like the dawning sun.
I too could start here at the day's beginning hour.
I too could burn away the shadows, hiding mists,
and beaded tears of dew from all the blades of grass.
I too could set the whole bright chorus singing clear,
to fill your darker dreams with light that falls on down
through half-closed curtains, banishing the chill of night
that lies so heavy on your naked shoulders now.
I could do it, but only if I could believe
I have the power to disperse your darkest clouds,
and give you all the bluest skies you still deserve.
I could then feel myself begin to rise up strong
and ready for another dawn, another day
despite my knowing how the darkness chases me
and knowing that the darkness chases all of us.
I know one day it will catch me, make my own sun
forever dark; extinguished. Then I will have lost
my final chance to burn so bright and shine for you.
Walking Away
The stiff awkwardness of formal gestures.
The sudden awareness of large hands made
tentative in half-completed gestures,
left to fall to the sides in spaces between
possibilities of touching and touched.
The realisation that words do not have
the eloquence of tears or silent communion.
The understanding of shared moments left
undeclared, even though distances remain,
we feel closer to knowing.
The hands made gestures towards touching
never really sure of the certainty of grip.
Again, we would like to see the world
on the outside of this moment just fall away.
Cold stone holds the notes suspended,
to fall like sunlight through stained glass.
Always so cold, as if to show and tell
of the distances we've all fallen and
there is nowhere else for us to go.
There is nothing here but dust, we let
it fall and walk away only knowing something
here has finished, only knowing how to walk away.
The gestures remain unmade, undone
and what steps are possible are slow
and, in some way, hesitant as if walking
away from here is walking away from
a former life forever, leaving it to memory.
Come a Time
Revealed
as only what might have been
there will come a time.
Revealed
as a whole sky burning fire
red in the stark morning
there will come a time.
Revealed
as dreams torment
your bed in restless flames
there will come a time.
Revealed
as a naked sleeping form,
sheets kicked back,
you dream of red dawns
and you know
one of these mornings
there will come a time.
frozen
paused by dreams
we call out
without sound
across the wide blank
spaces
where time never moves.
If we could only
(just frozen here)
take one more step
closer
we could touch
fingertip to fingertip,
lips meeting lips.
Feel the body's familiar warmth
expectation of desire
a possibility of redemption
taken to the extreme
limit of what could be.
Steps can be taken,
(time never stops)
gestures unfreeze
thaw
as time drips in the sunlight.
Falling
each second
into the river of memory.
Soon it will be gone
washed down to the sea
of all our histories.
Another tale told by sailors
standing watches in the dark
as the ships pass by,
shapes silhouetted
against the distant horizon.
The only limitations
are those we impose
shape our forms
of possibility
with our intentional fingers
divining shapes
out of formlessness.
Looking for familiarity
in ethereal entities
giving names,
(definitions)
to realised differences,
carving a sharp steady line
between what is real
and what we dream.
Who is to deny my dreams?
Who are you to say
what I can or cannot imagine,
what I can call real.
I want to step into that world of dreams
where everything becomes the possible
where no-one can prove any rule.
A place where physics does not limit
the sides, the edges and the centre.
An infinite universe forever
turning inside out.
Where rain could leave the earth parched
in order to swell heavy clouds,
where I could be the sort of person
you could feel capable of loving.
A place where I did not feel
the useless weight of
these clumsy hands.
waiting for the sky to ask for a dance,
she moves and the world
can only turn around her.
and they too, the sun and the stars,
can only move around her.
She is still, at the point quiescent,
and we can only move around her.
she is she and she is the centre
and we are only in orbit around her.
to conceive of touching.
Nothing is hidden from her,
no silence hides all she hears.
She is distance as well as centre.
We see far, but she sees all.
Spaces
I dream of narrow
spaces between stars
and vast unspanable
distances
between blades of
grass.
The distance
between words
and the soft touch
of hands on naked
skin.
Words that say
nothing
and the eloquence
of gentle silence.
The precise speech
of a fingertip
bringing into being
a whole universe
with the force of a
single touch.
Time
is Snow
I
long for the gentle grace of falling snow
and
how it wipes this
world clean
hiding
everything away under white sheets,
silent
again in stillness, untouched and calm
like
a room no-one enters.
I
walk through the crisping whiteness, leaving tracks,
a
mapping of memory,
of
routes taken, revealing decisions made.
A
chart of all explored possibilities,
new
worlds discovered and claimed.
Children
are always off in the cold distance
where
the snow becomes a tool
material
for shaping forms in gloved hands.
Taking
what is found and used for purposes
enough
to build a white world.
This
is the snow of our lives, heaped around us
at
the side of roads and paths.
A
disturbance to our smooth efficient world
pushed
aside in hasty piles from our driveways,
so
we can be somewhere else.
All
our creations are snow, melting in time.
All
our lives are snow, thawing
and
draining back into thick swollen rivers
tumbling
down to that endless eternal sea.
Time
is snow. There, and then gone.
Tongues
Her
skin was sunrise brown,
a
fine down, sand blonde,
almost
invisible across her arms.
I
kissed down her stomach
to
the blonde tangle. She sighed
and
spread her legs languidly.
I
could go down that path
to
the morning beach,
across
the shifting sand.
To
the licking, lapping tongue
of
the welcoming sea.
I
could let the waters wash over me.