Trout in the pool
grew fat in the shadows
under the branches,

then I cut down the sycamores.

Down came the heron
grey cloaked
up to his knees there
bent
and carrying dusk on his back

Gorse is fierce
for despite her soft lips
yellow pouting and smelling of nuts
(a sweet wise smell)
she nevertheless
savaged my nose
with her sharp green teeth
when I bent to partake

Dear dog:
it may be suggested
I write on paper of rice
the better to be digested
since your critique's so nice

I notice you baulked at the stamp.
Should I enclose a bone with future submissions
begged from my midnight lamp?

I suppose it could have been worse,
at least the dog has devoured my verse!

When I: with small words: bent to whisper
Some of her hairs (bronze and electric)
Touched my cheek.
Adrenalin sang: synapses burst into flower
All awareness flared
Just as she turned her eyes to me

Seen from above: they were a deep green well
Where secrets swam,
The green core at the heart of sunset’s backlit breaking wave
Sunlight through summer’s stain glass forest leaves
Greenstone on the beds of mountain streams
Wide pale emeralds set in the strong and lovely bones of face
Whirlpools in which to willingly spin
Mythic green flash of sun drowning in horizon’s sea

Then, leaning,
Still closer to her hair (because I loved the voltage there)
I gave my words
But closeness was a shock that rocked: then paralysed
A near eternal minute: unfolding time was frozen there.
There was a thing like scent: no musks, no florals nor turpines
But it held me tranced
Cocooned by it I swayed upon my feet
Intoxicant beneath the sun
Enveloped in a perfect moment


Then: stunned: I had to walk away
In to the everyday

Flame of the pale candle
Still seeming
Yet raging core of an unseen vortex
Where the physics of burning
Drew in atoms of oxygen
Dust motes
And the reeling moth
With sooty wings
Who flew too close.

But, unlike Icarus
Gathered the wax
Not lost it
Winnowed the fire
Not left it untouched
And did not plunge
Into an extinguishing sea.

A small man with a big smell
when his seldom washed clothes were drying after rain.
Stubble chin, fish eye, loose lip
but always ready for0 the tankard's rim,                                    
especially if you were buying.

One of the dark ones, relics of the Bronze Age,
whose ancestors had thrown their seed,
thin grain upon the small and bitter acres that he worked.

Only the rocks grow well in the fields of the grey hills!

At first I thought him diminished,
crushed by the land itself,
it's possession a cancer devouring
and defeat an old coat lashed round his middle with wire.

But drunk once, on a market day,
lowing and jammed like stalled beasts
into the FARMERS bar, he stumbled,
hugged me close to steady himself
and roared out loud to the heedless herd,
with arm outstretched, ******* to the world,
"****** you boys! I am still here!

Nobody heard but me,
whose ear was riven by that yell
and sprayed with rich spittle.

True though, despite the braggadocio of beer,
with the grain of him deep and compacted
like the rocks he fought, he did endure.