A coercive throat siphons the sky: delineating.
Men of Normandy, your dulcet words still flow
On aching gusts around these hillock ramparts.
Autumns tapestry fell with Harold, listless it
Furnishes the margin of an otherwise bleak-boughed
Wood. An obstinate robin: the failing furnaces closing
Ember, pursues the regressive winter light among the
Limbs of a grand oak, laden with iron cloud, low
And heavy. The thicket is sparse yet astir, two narrow
Eyes, eight square, inky pupils squat below the
Russet brow of a thrice augmented cottage: histories
White-washed witness, bearing pale stone arms and a
Jaunty red-bricked cap.




©*Thomas Gabriel

My window has no seat, why would it? I wish it did.
There is just a glossy magnolia ledge, barely wide enough to
cater a slender bottom. Upon the ledge books and candles
rest, illuminating the murk outside. Directly opposite orchard
trees recede as I welcome autumn with a zealous smirk.
For now faintly visible between their visceral arms are the
all-seeing hillocks that in winter will dominate my view.

An impartial observer once stated they were mere freckles
on the landscapes recumbent spine, but to me their sight alone
is vertiginous. On balmy April days I would surmount them,
a personal expedition, up there where I’m the valleys curator, wearing
pristine white gloves I meticulously unravel the terrain: an ancient
manuscript, the vellum inked with meandering streams, occasional farms,
cursive hamlets and little else - a land of sobriety and dearth.

In November though there is a permanent mist and its source
inexplicable. Does it simply effervesce from the precipitous tors about?
Is it the villager’s enshrined collective sigh? No it is something
more. Sitting atop the villages head it’s the beloved satin bonnet you
wore religiously as a child. Wholly impractical for this season
its gossamer fabric offers little solace or insulation to those below
as its pleated extremities elope with the moss-brown hinterland.

Fervently stoking their hearths the villagers broaden the
ethereal cloth with a smoke not acrid but satisfying and nourishing:
with a terrifically edible, hardwood flavour. From my hillock
vantage, the sanguine stone of the manorial chimneys is all that
penetrates the film; casually they release torrents of smoke like
ivory doves that weft patterns instinctively into the sky’s pallid damask.






©*Thomas Gabriel

The land was veiled
and silence exultant -
                p e r m e a t e d only by
sporadic
bird
calls
resonating from deep within the frozen forest
where life had retreated,
aghast by the glacial wind.


Cowering together,
               dwellings shivered
                             ephemeral oak structures
                             bowed beneath
the freshly shorn lamb’s wool that enveloped all,
hastening,
the shearer continued.


You left this night,
                   without a whisper
of regret
across the interminable,

     n     u      a     i     g      furrows
u     d      l      t    n

that ridicule your lifeless,
even features - pitiless,
your sodden soles penetrated the ****** snow.


Impervious to such inclemency
                       I traipse deep into the thicket,
reminded of how earlier
I collected from this q u i v e r i n g coppice,
                no more, no less
than my meagre allowance dictates.


Your stride is familiar,
for it was once mine
with metronomic ease I trace you,

further
further
further

traversing a promontory, I see you,
stood on a limestone plinth
                     overlooking
        shimmering pasture below.


You turn; we face,
        unwavering symmetry|
as stained crystals fall red with affliction
caressing the firmament I lace your name with my finger
                                   indomitable,
no more.





©*Thomas Gabriel

We found a new world,
                          yesterday.

Ordained with holy numbers
and d-a-s-h-e-s-
by modern priests in

blanket
white
cloth.

Pious, singularly
unromantic men.

Reaching for this sphere
it is into an unnamed sea
amid unmounted peaks
                            I shall fall,

a willfully disobedient
boy who drowned
with a hunger
that surpassed
                all worldly sustenance.

Though perhaps it’s for the best
I’ll never walk its corrugated

G a s e o u s
                surface,
for an epoch of chastity
would be corrupt
by my abrasive soles, my cutting
words, my fallible conscience
and mortal skin.


600 light-years?
I’ll save us both the effort.





©*Thomas Gabriel