…clinks in glasses
chilling the lips
unless a sudden contact
is avoided.

…is frigidity –
a grain of water
gleaned by the sun
is preferable.

…lingers slowly
dissipating.
Give me streams
as quick as bullets.

…chills a
red Dubonnet
till the wine
upends the sun’s intensity.

…sways
every eye
towards the skater’s
own uncalculated mastery.

…partners
the gritty frost
that folds the pebbles
in a skein of light.

Ice is the groin’s negation.
Ice is the temperance of nations.

Buttercups,
yellow like honey,
become peculiar sweets
towards the sea
-line where I sit
slighting the grey.

Stars, bubble-topped,
in champagne rise
the firelight of this beaded day.

Blow the blue swallows,
loops of the air,
whose south and southern fragrance
sow the summer day down to the –
say of nowhere newly made somewhere.

Lift all the wheat
the harvester the combine
combining to bind
binding the bound the golden.

Slip all the day
down to the throat
the ear stray
for the sea terns’ splash
or the noise of the stoat.

Graft till the grip
is the tight of crowded lines,
and the seaward trip
whitely stars
as phosphorescence drips
pleasure-presents, those
lips on lips.

The flags unfurled fly gloriously.
Tipsy barmaids fill the empty glasses
gleaming in the publight, frothy with beer foam
dripping from the fine-ground edges as I drink.
Where is yesterday? As lost as week-old flowers?
And regret that turns out pockets – is he gone as well?

I hear the flags flap grandly.
Cannons boom across the brimming beer.
A girl as young as any takes my arm
lifting me to the resurrection.
Voices mirror sounds
as soft as fish v’s in still water.

A neat disjointing:

Frost pricked by heat
melts; the rut of stone
jags at the eye no more.

A universal harmony
creates unnumbered stems:
the earth was never ******.

Condoning the green
mutability of things, he corners
baby pheasants (**** and hen calloohing in the scrub),
twists at the neck. Their eyes
pop with surprise. The good earth
will maintain this spawn gone wrong two ways.

He does not hear the clapping wings,
the hawk big with the misery of things.

Catching the hard, red cricket ball
I rub it on my trousers, spin it in my hand
and reaching backwards throw it at her.

Hard and accurate the ball
divested of a reason rotates through the air,
catching the sun upon its body, gathering
impetus until the eye is mesmerized.

It happened far too quickly:
the untiring accuracy of my throw
that never would have hit a wicket
folded against her with a gentle noise.

She winced, her hand upon her *****, tried to smile
and started crying like a girl;
and picking up the ball I threw it furiously down the field
and found myself in tears.

…and yet this leaves
me guilty, this creation,
lifting and stunning
as my fist has often stunned
the delicate fish that dies
and leaves me as a recompense
a heavy flesh, scale within scale.

The agony that peoples
such tormented heights
convulses in stone-breath.

The outward semblance
swells in neat conformity,
the lower thump of blood
curdles inside its chilled contraction.

Sensing outcrops, pale, limp wheat-blades
whitening beside the agonising certainty of beasts,
teethes like a fleshless jaw.

I hold my head up  
out of practice.
I perfect the stance.

The agony confronts me.
                       Stone.
                                 Stone-heights
group in their rigid surveys
me.