[you were]
"where love is a song settling in the night"
you were the softness of feathers
and the harsh cadence of grief,
you were the sky’s frail mists
and its glittering pools.
in the warm indigos of summer
i welcomed you home,
the sea with its engine pistons
played loud harmonics,
it wasn't the noise but quiet
i wanted most, the way i wanted you,
star silent, drifting like a boat.
[tonight]
tonight i can't write poetry,
a star is just a star
[shadows on my bones]
"when everything is washed out like faded jeans"
i thought i could stay alive
but there were shadows on my bones,
summer fell through my lips
and washed the colours from my shirt.
i became a lizard in the
dry heat.
the sky layered greys into
clouds, told me how
expressive it could be
and then turned white.
i wasn't going to argue
but i liked it better blue!
when your heart is
full of softness it gathers
the flowers of dusk.
the sea is so far from me
now, how can i remember
a wave or the bluster of
the wind?
i am as forgetful of
shape as foam, i am
as broken as driftwood,
i am the memory of
something that never was,
an impromptu impressionist
painting in ink.
[i've not written]
i've not written for a week.
i need to visualize, feed
on an image, grow out of
immense distance, slumber
on the rocks.
i need to paint a flower
in all its frailty, gather
the skies on the horizon.
until the bright lilies
have drowned me in their
white linens i will not feel whole.
gathering, gathering the world,
its moments stormy rooks.
[love poem]
"where love is a wave that splashes on the sand"
when a heart
loves
the stars surrender
to the heavens,
the moon catches her breath
and the avenues
of silence become
voice. i follow the
path to my love,
i die for him,
i live for him,
like a spartan
in the heat of battle,
like a flower in the
mist.
[summer tide]
the moon, shrunken, faint
as pencil, as if the wild nettles
of night carried her loads.
her glazes the raptures of
dancing stars.
her stencil mark a white crescent
leant on cloud.
the trees shudder in the
wind, break their promises,
forgive no one.
the tide listens to her rhythms,
traps them in water, distils
her victories, unwraps the dark,
stretches it out.
[out of the night]
out of the night, the softening rain dripping
from leaves and memories hanging like stars
in a northern sky, everything sank to the sea,
sinking in night and song and silence.
everywhere was still, no climbing to the dawn,
no old ghost singing winter to the sky.
it was time to leave, time for the grey ghosts
to crumble, time for the rose beds to sleep.
the morning dew is the water's flowers,
the early frost is the marbling of the earth,
we're pushed to emptiness by the iron-hinged wind,
melt in caves where the shadows lie hid.
from your hair, the glistening drops of rain,
from the air, the flight of a bird,
terrible and black the dark clouds,
where the night utters vowels its voice full of stones,
and its breath an empty pail once filled
with water and the kiss of the moon.
[grey stone sky]
grey stone sky, ghost clouds crying to the wind,
remembering the distant wave.
the moon was the whitening mists of time,
was the quiver of a musical note,
her broad branches silver seas,
her caverns quiet visions of light.
i stride the shores of oblivion where
dark ages hide, where the ocean falls,
i capture infinite moons in my
mouth, capture something bright,
something of you that i bless,
something of you that grows out
of the dark, glimmering like a night frost,
midnight stars dipped in a clear lake
and as the surface gleams and reflects,
how the water ripples in little blue tides.
[i ask you]
i ask you how the water cries, how you hold
the tide, the light, the thin light glistening.
i ask you how you bury root and earth,
how you dress the wind, how you carry
clouds in your mouth, how you drift
out of morning's ghosts, sky full,
how you drift downstream taking
part of me with you. i ask and i ask.
why do you not answer me? tomorrow
stretches her wings, tomorrow with her
tremendous oceans of fire, her dark eyes
full of hope while part of me dies.
no furnace could burn like you burn,
every whisper the dark, the infinite dark,
and that little flame hovering like a bird
a paradise higher than stars.
[the ocean dreams]
the ocean dreams...
colours like burnt kisses,
the blue mist tangles the air.
the shore shook out its creases
like old linen, fell under
the tumbling wave.
i drank the silence,
walking where the moon,
carried along by the song
of a ripple, dipped
her feet in the foam,
dancing, dancing...
beneath her ivory tongue,
a glistening jewel,
her alabaster skin
night's whitest rose,
and where the stars
wrapped december in
ghosts and the
gleaming water was the
quietest echo of love,
i could no longer bear
to be alone, and my tears
were the wilderness
and how it grew inside me,
and everything i loved was there
the wave carrying the wind
and i felt alive, as joyful
as the silver shore, a dark-pooled
painting of you, a river-eyed song.
[sad, sad eyes]
winter fed us with blood-red berries and ice clouds,
our visible breath soon colder than our lips.
i did not want to see what you had seen,
could not grow out of those sad, sad eyes.
we fell into the calm wave of circumstance
and twilight hurried from us into the dark.
hurried away like the last drop of sunlight
purples the earth, dancing on the edge of the world.
do we wait, stone-heavy, for the last tendrils
of day to melt like ice?
the fearful cold breathes like a fog,
gathers its stars of voice and hill,
gathers memories and distant dreams,
lets us forget.
are you the ghost that lies on the hill
calling to me?
are you that ghost,
whose irons soften like cloud,
whose frozen leaf trembles on the branch
waiting to fall to the whispering land?
your eyes are from the past and yet
they follow like a cold wind blasts.
your eyes, everywhere your sad eyes,
biting like a frost.
[do you dream of me?]
my love, you wear silence like a coat
and i am left drifting like a far-out wave.
the wind tangles leaf and sky.
winter is barely noticed, the moon
is a ghost of forgotten flowers where
the night sings to the starry waters,
sings of our love. everything is sailing
like a ship in a bottle, a kaleidoscope
of brightness, gothic hill and wildflower
ruin, flowing like a silvery stream.
do you dream of me? do you burn when
the night wraps you in her cloak and the moon
unwinds the waters of the seas?
do you dream of me?
[morning]
a bird slid into the wind's
bright paths, awoke
the sound of morning, the
only elegant sound. i sprinkled you
you with the roots of the rain and
with a song sweetened by
sunlight and although you were stunted
and your blue-blossom wings were broken,
and the very earth swam in dark
floods of tears, that little piece of
love was a kingdom as reachable
as your hand touching mine.
[song]
this was a song that lingers in caverns and
caves, scented by sea rose and anemone,
lost kingdoms where we dream of the sea.
this was a song like a whale shivering
through the water, diving into the
impossible dark, with its huge tail
waving, flag-like and star-hungry,
its skin the moon's lips, in a world
with no moonlight, no brightening pools,
and only echoes of a forgotten sun.
how deep do we dive, seals of ink
and overtures of unanswerable
dark? our eyes have been betrayed
many times and the water buries us
whole, takes us to the staccato rhythms
of a ghostly tide, takes us back to
a womb woman whose prayers lie
like whispers on the water, who tells
us to hush and we hear our mother's voice.
these are wild notes that press into the
waves, and i am frightened of this song,
it is dissonant and gathered from the
rivers of night, her tombs overgrown with
wild flowers and the bones of the sea,
and she cries for the lost,
for those that were taken from her,
and she will cry for all eternity
and her tears are like breath of ice.
[winter]
winter buries her flames,
buries whispers of river and leaf,
the sea wraps turquoise into bronze,
everything is full of white bones,
the sky is an illusion of clouds,
her petticoats blue rags,
the day is as heavy as a paperweight,
as brittle as a glass flower,
the light is as naked as the trees
gold could not be more cold,
the sunlight reflects in the snow,
her amber eyes gleam,
nothing flows, nothing flowers,
nothing flows, nothing flowers,
and your smile is the sun,
a ghost as faint as watercolour,
the brush dipped in daylight,
a little part of me.
[waiting]
i stood there waiting like a
nettle with the moon's forget-me-not
eyes, wild flowers overflowing
down the little paths, i was the flower that
no one wanted, a black companion
****.
my cherry mouth was built of
forgotten orchards and swallow's wings,
while my hair was blown by the indigo wind,
the moon tap, tap, tapping on the door.
the whiteness of the land, the colours of
winter and how her song arose out of
the dark, bearing my soul like the
earth rediscovered, glistening in the
light, drawn out of hollows, the shadows
driven back, with a dry root's crazy thirst
that left me longing for rain.
the poetry could not quite free itself
from my lips, dragged me down to
the earth where i staggered with
the lost and the weary. i tried to get back,
but all I could do was sink into the frozen waste.
no, the poetry would not free itself, and
still I waited but it didn't seem to matter
now because leaf and moon and the
frosting that covered my body had left
me like a pale ghost in the wilderness
and all I wanted to do was sink into
the cold cornered night, sink and forget.
[moonflower]
out of the water, the water of ghost pools,
you rose, naked figurehead, oh, flower of night.
an impressionist's brush shook the water
like light reflected on moonstone.
****** of prisms, flowering, flowering,
lost ocean of star voices, forgotten star.
you sang and the night ran towards the sea,
you blossomed and the night became a wanderer.
nectar of the gods, sky-visionary, you sink into
the night like the petal of a rose, the grass almond-
eyed and whispering to you her dreams, fluttering
like a butterfly; little moonflower, you gather
the shadows and the song of the dark, the
drift of the clouds is your bare feet running,
the drift of the clouds, the cold sea crashing
in the harbour, the drift of the clouds,
the incredible overflowing of sky, poet-
ink and straying hair, the drift of
the clouds, everything that scatters
like you on the wind.
[we seek...]
we seek the ocean in the palm of our hands,
breath is the frailties of a winter sky,
the stars are reflections in a mirror of bone.
we are carried by the wind into strange avenues
where we fall like leaves, dance into the indigos
of the washed out sky, haunt the dimming light like night
blossoms and dies, her rivers burning like fire.
we awaken in the eastern
sky washing slumber from our eyes, yawning
and day drops her heavy nets into the waters
of the sun and drowns out the voice of the dark.
flowers settle in the morning, capturing
the silence of the hills in petals of water and light,
and we drink passion and ink, we drink the colours
of our emotions and walk without hesitation towards the light.
[song of the wind]
the wind has something of your wild song,
whispers in a voice i knew long ago.
there is nothing here accept the empty wind,
nothing of you and me,
i could paint the silence with the moon,
kiss your mouth, touch your hair....
but we are forgotten like this song
of the wind, and in the emptiness
i can hear the faltering wave
fall against the belly of the sand
running like the white clouds
race through the sky,
where the stars fall like old ruins,
this ghost dance of stars, these crashing,
crashing waves. where is the freedom
of the falling water?
not in the breath of the earth,
not in the silvering of the sea.
[you are neither]
my love, you are neither the morning
with her bright unwinding hills
or the night, with her nets of silver stars,
you are not the sea whispering.
you are hidden from the world, an alpine
rose that nobody sees.
you flower like the sky makes its way
out of the dark, her archipelagos
thrown to the wind, there to discover
like a frost that whitens the earth and
leaves its footprints in the leaves.
you are neither the moon, my love,
that waits at your feet
nor the sun that burns like the
summer with her mute fire. you
are none of these things and yet all
these things carry me to you,
like a drifting cloud longing
for the waters of the night.
[those brief moments of heaven]
the land was a slumbering bird that had not yet opened
its eyes. the morning roared like a thunder
cloud and i gazed at the sky with her cornflower blues
and orchestral flutes, her dark bones whitening
in the yellow-threaded light. silence wrapped me like
a shawl, and love settled on my shoulders like
a bird. it was too early for the swallow to return
with its spring-tinted wings, the winter settled
in the nooks and crannies of the earth, sweet
as your mouth, crisp and cold as the ashen north.
and while you lay beside me, warm, nocturnal
and dreaming of the sea, i kissed your lips
and told you to hush, not because you had spoken but
because night had been so gentle to you that i
wanted to keep you wrapped in her star-scented arms.
[silence]
silence moored like a boat in the harbour,
and you flew against the horizon like a bird
until my mouth was the night with its hungry stars
and you were the sea wind.
you were the night flowering, a ripple on
the surface of the water, the dreams of the ocean...
your eyes told me that history is made of a
a thousand bleeding wounds, your lips that
kisses are petals falling from a rose
and that we wait like old moons for night
to melt on the shore and set us free, we wait,
unquestionably free, for her gathering of
iris and blue bird, for her beautiful
and melancholy song.
[february]
the light, the faint curtain that draws across day,
far from night's shadows, creature of fire,
revolves, drops white nets into the sea-earth,
where ice and the aching frost cry out
and the soil hardens with its harsh, freezing edge.
we are deaf and blind, numb of limb
like the thin trees and the specter-sky,
blue and forlorn, dreaming our winter dreams...
and through the cold walls i can hardly draw
a smile, sad as a silver leaf the autumn forgot.
it is you who lifts me from the ground, somehow,
like an april shoot seeking the sun, somehow,
my bones as frail as a bird and yet
when the air stirs my blood and i stare into
the amber notes of the wind, the unforgiving land
buckles and breaks and i return to the
kernel of your heart and even the icy
lakes and the weighty forest you loved
under your skin that the light waits to
warm, forget their cold death, breathe
like summer returning to a distant shore.
[empty of light]
there is nothing of you in this late hour,
i have no voice to wrap you in tenderness,
and i wait for your arrival like a starless sky,
empty of light, the ocean's forgetful voyage,
the sinking wave coaxed to grow out of the dark.
the trees are motionless, branches fall silent in the night,
like ghosts against the sky. i am empty of light,
drawn out of memories and blue air,
a crystal that breaks, bound to the wide earth
and the white dust of immeasurable hills. i think i am
still, small as a bird, and i know that i long for you,
that the hunger never leaves me for long, colouring
dry paper with the gleam of a harbour-like moon.