Poetry

Untold Story

The men and boys entered
the van like molecules in
a nostril
becoming a scent.
Something there, thoughts
heaving like gypsies,
crouching at the edge of
the pit. Matted
hair, teeth, bone, and sweat.
A crushed feather marks
the page. Charactery of flight:
chiseled dollops
of whipped-cream over
an illuminated glacier of light
with three-volume wind. Paper
struts being solidly
ambivalent as scripture. Stories shout
like cones of smoke blowing
from the men; while the boys breathe
like bats curled to sleep in the pavilion
of your ear.

At Lella’s Farm

In the pen
the young colt
pranced to a hand
at the rail. He snuffed its palm
where the sugar cubes
had been. They stood
there, not waiting. The damaged
wind drew back to its drip
feed in the hills. One of them whistled
for the hand’s
owner to come back
to the pickup. The colt snorted
and arched into a coiled
spring. The pickup’s engine
shivered a reflective calamity.
Further up, a white cloth
was clacking like a freight train.
They were off, all of them. A point
at the source of the dust column.
We heard the colt
alone in its skin, a wet
envelope, a waving sheer wall.

An Attempt at Meaning

Bernard, have you read
that line of Eliot’s:
- and I quote –
Men can do nothing
without the make-believe
of a beginning? Was Deronda’s
imminent voyage to Palestine
make-believe? Beginnings
(and ends, too) conjure
a geometric world
we refuse to inhabit.
And spatial is not geometric:
that depth on which we tread water
is more like a mirror. A vision-field
sprinkled with scabs
and caesuras where time
stares into that tragedy called life.
Too deep? How about a little
less strings and more
tympanum? There you go,
marching off with that little
back pack whose contents
I once contributed to.
So, I admit (albeit vicariously)
that there is a before
and - therefore - an after.
Bloody geometry!
Shame on us, Bernard!
We are not that special,
are we? Now, in this scheme,
is a central point. Someone else
will take its place one day.
But not now.

Lilies of the Field

He passed me the plates and they dripped
all over the wooden floor. The story
he was telling me was about some delivery
that had gone wrong. Like a pie bird or a torn
piece of Kleenex. The lorry
backed up about ten feet. It had a strange
ring to it, like a quacking mouse in the children’s
tale. We saw a parade of nuns along the road
when Sidney Poitier popped-up in his pink
Yank tank. That’s who he called his friend
from Ghana, except his friend had dreadlocks
and drove an off-white Twingo.

Surfing Home

The time left to us varies in value like a Bermuda call option.
Early exercise is precisely what is meant
and not a long evening at the bar de la plage.
There’s no getting out of it.
Overeating implies a tab on the room,
a provisioning for the end,
like a an Egyptian prince
stocking up for the Underworld
at 2 a.m., the minibar
cleaned-out. He flies home and gets his
jellaba from the cleaners and considers how
utterly surfless the Mediterranean is.
Somewhere between America and Europe
an accountancy principle whips-up a wave in his
Zinfandel. Here is the divide
between what my life is worth now
and what it may be worth tomorrow.
A peak and a trough. The crowd
spills onto the luggage belt.
It splashes over clothes and books,
and recedes, carrying all along with it…

Surfing Home

The time left to us varies in value like a Bermuda call option.
Early exercise is precisely what is meant
and not a long evening at the bar de la plage.
There’s no getting out of it.
Overeating implies a tab on the room,
a provisioning for the end,
like an Egyptian prince
stocking up for the Underworld
at 2 a.m., the minibar
cleaned-out. He flies home and gets his
jellaba from the cleaners and considers how
utterly surfless the Mediterranean is.
Somewhere between America and Europe
an accountancy principle whips-up a wave
in his Zinfandel. Here is the divide
between what my life is worth now
and what it may be worth tomorrow.
A peak and a trough. The crowd
spills onto the luggage belt.
It splashes over clothes and books,
and recedes, carrying all along with it…

Surfing Home

The time left to us varies in value
like a Bermuda call option.
Early exercise is precisely what is meant
and not a long evening at the bar de la plage.
There’s no getting out of it.
Over eating implies a tab on the room,
a provisioning for the end,
like a an Egyptian prince stocking up
for the Underworld
at 2 a.m., having cleaned-out
the minibar. When he flies home
to Alexandria, he recovers his jellaba
from the cleaners and considers
how utterly surfless the Mediterranean is.
Somewhere between America and Europe
an accountancy principle whips-up
a wave in his Zinfandel. Here is the divide
between what my life is worth now
and what it may be worth tomorrow.
A peak and a trough. The crowd
spills onto the luggage belt.
It splashes over clothes and books,
and recedes, carrying all along with it…

My Previous Dogs

High-up at the vertical limit of sight, caught on a flake of rusty guttering
hidden in the leaves of a Californian walnut,
pressed in the middle of a waffling summer (despite this weather), diphthonged
at a flange in the upper-register,
flayed at a paint-crackled curl in the canvas
alone in an attic like a cork on a gene pool. But who now has attics?
Who can see further than the term of their years,
past the landfall of mornings when you’ve just woken up
from the Valium of three am? Derek and Brendan
are laying the sprinklers, piling up the lawn down the side passage.
Who can afford professional gardeners, standing here
in the graves of my previous dogs? Without a network
of skills and friends and capacious fridges that pack
air into zip-locks, the afternoons
would drag their ballast of marine-life an entire octave along the guitar,
into slack-key, hitting a pitch too high for humans.

Plums in Honey

What has become of the dating game? Let’s see:
Ernesto revels in his love-beads as Angela bakes her treasured lemon-cake.
The entire den is subdued. Leo warns of his rising ire
but we’re not talking about Pompeii.
The Pimpernels have consumed their third packet of Student Feed
in this era of wasabi-coated peas.
Bernard slips out with Pat for a joint. Pat comes back
showered in a Roman triumph of soap-stone cones.
Poetry is the object here, but are we really motivated?
Bernard lounges on the porch dreaming of a steak and beer night
alone in the Ardennes, the two children asleep.
Leo names them in cheap move to bring down the house.
This morning Eve saw a small group,
cupping their hands at the edge of the pool.
A fourth stood away off playing a button accordion.
He sang of perspiring empires and nights
beneath the Mario Plaza. We got jealous.
So jealous, in fact, that text messages flew around the room
with no subject lines. When you’ve nothing to say
sing it, when you’ve nothing to think …
… and so on. Plums in honey. That sort of thing.
Otherwise, there’s shopping with the Bin Ladens in the Via Barbuino.
At least we can tag along, unlike the no-show Pope.
I promised mum, yes Joan, mum, with her crook knee and mean tortellini.
Here she is. We had a date at the fiftieth.
The years only leave us with speculation.
They are our touch judges. Our concreters.
Filling the gaps where our bodies had been. The olive oil skin, the acacias,
the footprints on the beach like a Bolivian heiress.