Suitably respectful, and
never asking for trouble
or the time of day
I wait at home-station
like a cattle dog
My master, absent in the midst of a promise

My bones wait for flesh
My theatre
for Godot

As factories burn
As droughts become floods
As Apollo is a god sending chariots to the moon

I’m ten years beyond birth already counting ways
to escape the infirmary

The hallway mirror
holds an apparition of silence
And over my shoulder
Is reflected a leafless tree
of seeming indifference

There may be leaves one day
but who can say

I wait
like Didi
for what I mean

For all our conversations
It’s the silences I remember
Quiet times
In rooms together

You attentive to the preparation of a letter
an essay
or considering carefully,
music you're about to play

And me sitting on the sofa
Reading Carver or Whitman
Quietly appreciating your contemplation
Pretending only to be interested in what I'm reading

I do not tell you that your presence completes me
Or
How you feel from across the room

I do not say,
I am grateful for your company


MChallis © 2015

The boy who hangs his story from the bridge.
As if by fairy tale told minutely to a desperate lover.
Her tormented eyes
picturing this broken neck;
his story told in the lingering art of death.  Or

he who faces the train to Ferny Hills
and each commuter who remembers
that day’s monotony as bits of him
slapped against a carriage like
someone throwing wet fish.  Or

the pass-over traffic
grumbling at the fall of tragic demonstration - a
boy not welcomed anywhere except by the earth
that took him in with a kiss of bitumen.  Or

balanced on needle point, a
thousand thousand weights pressing death
into an arm embracing the TV-cable guide and
a torn photograph of Jennifer the mud wrestler.
And all this waste
sending little statistic waves of shock that don't anymore.

Gone to sleep like the boys who left us.
Early sleep. Early rise and forget the
sons who disappear in a magician’s finale.
The cloak of social history that accepts this.
The magic
abracadabra of disturbed unhappy youth.

Drown in the blue sky
the blue sea
the green land
and all the while white waves; of wash,
cloud or smoke arising.
On this rock I am every particle
I can see, and more than I am,
none of this, and separate is
my life a paradox continuum
inexplicably explained as
stable passing impermanence;
if I could drown in the blue sky
I would do it flying.


MChallis © 2015

when the sound of every car door slamming is yours
the ring in every telephone is you
when the whisper in every voice
the cast of every eye
the ball in every park
the call in every sonnet
the face in every smile
the bubble in every brook
is you,
what is left for me to do
but write you down in every word
and read you,
over and over and over


MChallis © 2015

There were painter’s clouds that day;
broiled and tumbled,
moving inner silence across an easel.

Beneath them
a concrete mind mixed and etched
one long brush-stroke;
the tarmac before us.

Excited engines carried us along
and carried by us
an air befriended...

with the convertible top thrown down
your hair streamed behind
olympic colour; a spectrum of extraordinary.

Your head held back a sunrise laugh
and all the wind
belonged to exhilaration.

Ahead of us, the horizon captured another sky,
a mist-green hail filled sea; that ominous litany.

A pallet knife scratched its lightening
and the danger of no potential
that kept us moving on.


MChallis © 2015

Returning to you sylvia in the black week of no moon:
the carapace
the awkwardness
aflame with evidence
the jew-net of Poland
-- your rack of guilt.

to fly at the sun or burn in its shadow
emptying pockets before you leave
you reap an abandoned harvest, but

the acolytes who call and call hear the ringing of rocks;
bells around the necks
of ghosts
lying down in
hallowed halls,  somewhere bellowing

their words
        like yours
punishing  me
punching  me up the middle,
every image jagged remedy
my **** to my heart
jammed with grief,
throat swolen with loss

the case of your broken bits;
crockery splintered
in capsules or
shoeboxes or drawers carefully there,  there

you are lips pressing
cold glass,
to kiss you to drink your warmth
impossible

after death I hear you;
crow sends your messages
but sweet sister that’s not why you call

inimical oven:  cavern and synagogue,
I am undone
discovering buried treasure.

in the breath of trees you are
somehow there,
in the quick-slip of feet across smooth linoleum
my mausaleum agrees with your arrival

but in the hour before dawn
in the silent roaring volume
you never hear of my love for you

we are cold lovers
both agony


MChallis © 2000/2014