THE BACKWARD LOOK
( for D.B. )


the blackbird
leaves me a note
pinned to the sky


that blue
beyond
blue


the tide
of the moment
turning turning


Time
like apple blossom
falling through my mind


the little boy
unable to believe
that this day is not


made of forever
and only
now


I walk back
through my self
to unpin the note


the blackbird wrote
with his voice
still pinned


to that
self same
sky


the blue so still
beyond
even its self


I, at last, able to read
the birds words
its language a secret


no longer to me
"I  sing..."  it says  "...I sing
because all this must die!"


"I sing the moment's tide
its turning
always turning!"


It's throat
full of song
glorying in being


alive for this
one eternal
moment








A moment ago he had been singing( as he had been singing for me all these years ):

"In the event
that this fantastic voyage
Should turn to erosion
and we never get old
Remember it's true, dignity is valuable
But our lives are valuable too"

I was also reading this 4 line fragment from the 9th century :

"There is one
I would wish to see again,
And give the golden world to win -
All, all, though all were vain."

"Fil duine
Frismbad buide lemm díuterc
Ara tabrainn in mbith mbuide
Uile, uile, cid díupert."

And so I wrote him this little poem....THE BACKWARD LOOK.

CHOCOLATE EXPLANATIONS

“Right...! ”
I try to explain it
with chocolates
that she(girlishly)
keeps trying to eat.

I pick a luscious
dark chocolate seahorse
And I say “Now this is...”
(and she finishes my sentence for me)

“...your hippocampus! ”
She squeals... delighted with herself.
“That’s correct! ”
I praise her
“...it’s shaped like this seahorse! ”

“And it controls
your memories of you
your “who you are”

your “how your self assembles
its sense of self
...with all its past and future mysteries! ”

“Yes...yes...that’s it!
She claps her hands
thrilled to bits

by the familiar telling
the reassurance of sounds.
And this twisted twirl of almond
with a real almond in the centre of it
“... is your amygdala! ”
She blurts out before me.
“You got it”
I smile.

“Everyone’s got one!
a seahorse & an almond
one on each side of our brain.”

“Now the almond tells you how
to respond to the things
that you’ve assembled
into a sense of self

...with the proper emotion
...the right feeling.
...whether you just like
or love it”

“Oh, I love it...I love it! ”
She almost sings.
“Now, explain it to me again! ”
I give her the finished explanations
and she eats them

with much exaggerated
mmmmming & ohhhhhing.
“I love your explanations
about what’s wrong with my thingy”
She knocks upon her head
like it was a door
to a self that she had
locked herself outside of.

Most times
she doesn’t even know
her name
or who
or what
she is.
But she loves this story of
HIPPOCAMPUS AND ITS FAITHFUL AMYGDALA

She loves
each sound
each word
each letter
each pause
of the chocolate
explanation.

SHADOWS LEFT BEHIND

"Eh...excuse me..."
smiled the Neanderthal
on the Circle Line

he wanted to know
where
to get off

"How come I can
understand you?"
I asked without talking

"Oh I took a course
ages ago now
in Telepathy As A Foreign Language."

he wanted to see
his girl
a pretty Denisovan

who was staying
with a palaeontologist
at South Ken or something

he had bought her
a Divje Babe flute as
she dug the pentatonic scale

told me he had been
working in
the Mousterian stone-tool industry

he saw that I was
reading about muons
of all things

"How can you possibly
know about wobbling muons?"
I asked in wild surprise

"Oh when one is
you know...dead
one knows about everything!"

he smirked
"For the snark was
a muon you know!"

told me he was
a big Lewis Carroll fan
as it goes

"May the 5th Force
be with you!"
he deadpanned

"Holy incredulous questioning Quark!"
I exclaimed in
a Batman/Robin tone

but his stop
was coming up and
I told him where to get off

"MIND THE GAP!"
the tannoy warned him
"MIND THE GAP!"

Slán...slán go deo!"
he waved to me
switching to the Irish

"Is  fearr an tsláinte
ná na táinte!"
he offered as a parting

"DOORS CLOSING
DOORS...CLOSING!"
the tannoy butted in

and he was gone
from my sight as if
I had only imagined him

back into the depths
of a time I
could not conceive of

chewing a mammoth
sandwich and looking
for an exit

A DINOSAUR EATING THE NIGHT

Death had frozen
his mind

and all his musings become icicles
stalactites and stalagmites  of thought.

He snapped a thought off
an even number of stalactites and stalagmites .

Then he placed them one by
one in his jaws

like row upon row of
dinosaur teeth.

"Roar!' he roared
roaring himself out of this

"whatever it is!"

"Roar!" he roared again

eating the night
and all it brought

with his new stalactitestalagmite
dinosaur teeth.

When the night was all
eaten he

lay back and
fell asleep

inside the dream's
dream.

"Brother!" he said

and his dead brother
comforted him as if

he was not dead.

"Brother!" he cried

but the world had
reappeared

ready for the new day
that was spread before it.

*

The non-sense of dreams trying to organise chaos into some form of order and not succeeding.

AN ACUTE ABSENCE OF WEATHER

( for my little brother Brian )

tomorrow arrived too late
to save you
you had become

the past tense
no longer present at your own life
time had abandoned you

the world turning its back
on the sun
staring into the night

a darkness
without stars
the far away barking of dogs

a somewhere
that's nowhere
where even the weathervane

doesn't know which way to turn
the acute absence
of weather

*

Because of his stature in the world and his skill at making his way through its faults and falls...he had become the BIG BROTHER simply because of who he was. Only now in death does he once more become my little brother. I became a mere meddler with words...a peddler of poems.

When he was truly my little brother he once asked me one of those childlike questions that adults or even slightly big brothers find impossible to answer.

Lost in himself he asked of me" "Is there weather when you die?" I didn't know how to answer it then or...now.

On the great barn that was his shed he had placed a weather vane and we still look at it to this day as it searches for the answer to this question.

I had told him then that: "Whatever...there would be weather."

I suppose he could now answer his 7-year-old-self's strange little question.

HIC IACET ROBIN, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS


I have to admit
I hadn't thought of you
for quite a bit


and that though
we had never met
I thought of you as a friend


who could always
make me laugh despite
the sadnesses in my life


the night that you left
I was doing you
being Bruce Springsteen


being Elmer Fudd
"I'm wving in my karrr..."
and laughing

to my self
even my mirror
was laughing


remembering Mork
manically morphing
into anyone anything



a menagerie of personalities
the so many people you
. . .could be


you so...
singularly...plural
always a becoming...


"... but then there you are s
itting around and doin' nuthin'
and death comes up and goes: "Boooo!"


"Shhh. Be vewy vewy quiet,
I will always think of you
as you



being so
very much alive
you wascal you!"

KICKING THE BUCKET

The moon has fallen
asleep in a bucket

can't get back out despite
trying to slide over the rim.

It trembles as a train
thunders past midnight.

A child tries to catch it
its tiny hand plunging

through another dimension
through to its nothingness.

The moon takes its chance and
escapes to the sky with a splash.

It's all gone now
( the barn of course )

but the house...the child...that moon
are no longer to be found.

Strange to think
a house can die.

A tree enters through
the kitchen window

lays
its head upon a table.

The bedroom
is without its roof.

A door still stands
without its walls.

It bangs in the breeze
a surreal Morse code.

The living room is home
to a family of nettles.

A sofa moulders
a new line in zombie furniture.

A hare stands upon a chair
barely able to hold itself together.

One of the chair's legs
genuflects to a sunset.

The hare hops upon
the rotting table top

enters the tree's head
and leaves upon its branches.

Somehow the bucket
survives.

Still standing outside
the outhouse.

It is full of storm
right to the brim.

It holds within itself
the moon of now.

Trains no longer
thunder by.

I, that child
now - this man

let the moon
splash through my hand

before throwing it
into the night's sky.

Always wanted to do that
before I kicked the bucket.