And again that thought we all have:
What if I die a complete failure?
But empty your mind for one moment
and those braced spruce will answer you.
A woman dropping pink apples from a torn bag.
The fox cub like a ball of rust
falling on the snow-hills
she’s unable to climb.

On this planet we’ve been so fortunate.
The difference has been abstract
between what winds
and what goes straight.  
It isn’t even possible to fail
when nothing has been asked of you.

Everything, yes, is God, but tread
very carefully with that idea.
Knowing it doesn’t mean you need
to stop at every toad to kneel, repent,
or spend a more than average time
staring at a forest or a dinner plate.
When I was young the masters said
only Spaniards or Arabs could use
the word God in a poem, and those
only of a certain age and reputation.
They were wrong. Use God unsparingly,
in everyday speech, like the old sage who,
having forgotten all other words, requests
food and clothing and death with the same
Ram, Ram, Ram that is his entire language.
Or maybe better drop the word and hear
music as music, wind as wind, you and him
kissing as you and him kissing. Evolve
beyond naming, the fetish to divide.
Deep inside and silent is the thread
that links each thing together, but tread
carefully when you find you know. Knowing
places no compulsion on action or belief.
Be the monk you are or the hedonist. Remain
the friend, the brother, the frightened idiot.
Knowing this requires no change. If it
is not known softly then it is not known.

about the shivers
running down your spine.
Shivers won’t run
when talk is going on.
When you touch the holy stone
or read the words of the sacred book,
touch and look, but never talk.
Minds don’t shine
when songs are being sung.
The yew that stands in the ancient wood
lets seed cones fall within
circles of thrush and waxwing calls.
Trees never grow without the sun,
whatever was being thought
while the seeds were sown.

Ink falls spherical in the air
and maintains that shape while falling.
Ink in the air’s a gymnast tucking
her legs and arms into her core.

Hitting water everything contained
within the frame of its own self
spiderwebs out and so becomes
vaguer and more formless as it grows.

Days in human memory appear like this:
Clear for hours after they’re provisionally made,
then all fade and deformation as they tend
to nothing but suggestion in the end.

‘And what are five miles from a station in these days of bicycles?’
-E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

Nothing cracks the rigid heart up
more easily than a microchip
in the cucumber sandwiches
and a lick of dubstep can really ruin
a lawn party in a Merchant Ivory flick.  
My mother was sure Ratzinger
resigned the papacy because they were making him
update his Twitter feed too often.
Some of the saddest moments of Bonaparte’s life
came while reading
Pierre-Simon Laplace.
Time itself is an adjustment.
Do you know, for instance,
Katharine Hepburn, on the set of Suddenly, Last Summer,
refused to believe there was such a thing
as a homosexual?
Mankiewicz, born to Jewish immigrants,
must have learned diplomacy early on.
His line:
Belief isn’t necessary
if you can act like you believe.
This— here—
is the sharp edge of nostalgia.
The cowpuncher pining for a white Alabama.
How the man who broke his wife’s jaw longs
for his wife to come home.
It’s hard to pity them, I know.
But if compassion’s worth anything
we ought at least to try.
The light has upped a notch.
Their rigid hearts
repine like window-blinds.
These days of bicycles have made
no new truths
but they say that things are clearer now.
By what’s reflected up from water,
in the caverned underside of leaves,
we see Freddy Honeychurch and Mr. Emerson jumping
pale and bare-arsed into The Sacred Lake;  
the Reverend Mr. Beebe
circling their young,
wet bodies like a paunchy moon.

I

That twitch in the schoolgirl’s eye
Isn’t caused by snowy mountains.
There’s Guildhall in her twisted lip.

II

I was of three minds.
Greta Thunberg took all of them
And cloaked them in a yellow hood.

III

A small part of the pantomime was never Greta’s style.
She has miles to go before she lets us sleep.

IV

Of the things schoolgirls hate
The sun is not among them.
The blackbird’s wings and the oil fields of Manitoba
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The thought that they might one day bring out
Greta Thunberg bobbleheads
Or the fact that bobbleheads exist at all,
The fact that we’re ******
Or the fact that we’re enjoying it.

VI

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O pigtailed teens of Stockholm,
Please remember
What Wallace Stevens said
About birds of golden feathers
And of black.  

VIII

What is involved in what I know?
Like Socrates, I don’t know.
But it’s more than 99.9 per cent
Of climate scientists could ever dream
And less than a signpost
To the wrong city in the snow.

IX

When Greta sailed two weeks to New York
She was in a circle of close friends.
I bet they ate tinned kippers
And had those sweets the Swedish love.  

X

To cry out sharply is what we do
If we are lucky enough to cry.
And so I have more compassion
For Greta than you know.  
Some women have no time.
Their children dying
Takes up the best portion of the day.

XI

I can’t remember the part of the campaign trail
He rode over to tell a waiting crowd
How the size of his equipage
Compared to his small hands.
There are good reasons why Greta hates his guts.
This is not the best of them.

XII

The river is full of plastic.
The thermometer must be rising.

XIII

It is snowing
And it is going to snow.

Your thorns.
My blood on fire.
I need you here.

Where has my life gone?
I live for you.
Where are the reveries
I had yesterday?

I miss you.

*For original see Robby (https://hellopoetry.com/Donde/)

Let’s kiss and nothing else.
Let’s kiss four times and let
each one enhance the other
like a mirror image in a mirror.
Once like billiards glancing.
Once like soles touching stone
on single steps of a long journey.
Once like a thumbnail over rind.
Just once how a raindrop meeting
a larger water vanishes and becomes.

Purple field, red sky.
The planet remembers things
Before blues and greens

What’s the final cost
of tripping the canoe on a tricky wave
and failing for nights and days to lift it up again
and patch the places broken through by knives of rock?
What pit bull boats with padded chests for prows,
with ears of wind-filled sail, will pass us by and knock
another panel from our body with their wake?
What lost islands do the well ships seek?
Where do they go beyond the sea-hemmed sky?
Those who can still row, who still know why.

Like smells in old cloth (of cloves or maybe smoke)
your face long after you’ve gone away
finds, inside my mind, hollows and depressions.

My mood is like something changed by the addition
of something foreign (and for the better
the way languages grow ecstatic as pidgins multiply.)

My feelings perch like drab birds and wait for thoughts
of you to come (like letters from somewhere out of town.)
Then their feathers turn, and show the colour under grey.

She couldn't recall in any detail
the few small love affairs of her life.
But she did remember when the stud pig
was brought to her parents’ farm,
how, after its work, it lay
in the sty and sound of blue rain.
How it ran its snout up and down the fine hairs
on the sleeping round of the sow's neck.

Before falling it swells disclike and becomes splendid;
all the poisoned oils and drab colours strained away
and replaced over by bright, blonde yellows like cups of light.
Before breaking, the connection between the fruit and branch
grows twice as strong and in the final seconds before decay
a scent runs across the tree that the seed knew well, before forgetting.

That’s the strange part:

in the act of transformation
no desires can be taken
from old state to new state.

Either we abandon
even the impulse to exit to the shell
or we ourselves will never leave it.

Think of it:
grey Kansas with its headlong wind
broken once by barn doors laying on their side and then
unbroken for miles and free riding through frozen, standing
grass. A cathedral with purple walls— somehow subterranean
though above the ground— where men cage-dance to each
other’s angles but do not glance the paid for swells they make
in mirrors, glasses, countertops; in eyes and brainstems like a burn

and something scopophilic in the soul gears in to what is seen
but not to what exists; how actors in even outstanding erotica report
the lack of desire they feel while watching their own play reel back; how they
are not the moans or counter-moans; the sounds of kissing or the glinting
looks that pass between performers as a cue or like those cubic lanterns master
calligraphers spend a month adorning with a dozen of their favourite poems
only to set a light inside them; to watch them rise with heat and frazzle
to trails of ember in the air.

What’s dead that still
drives action?
From the graveyard I heard  
mallards fighting in the green pond.
Stinging flies following  
roads through barks of lime.
On a grave a notice had been taped.
My wife is under this stone, it read,
I promise you, you won’t graffiti it
more times than I can clean it.