Back when it took all day to come up
from the curving broad ponds on the plains
where the green-winged jacanas ran on the lily pads

easing past tracks at the mouths of gorges
crossing villages silted in hollows
in the foothills
each with its lime-washed church by the baked square
of red earth and its
talkers eating fruit under trees

turning a corner and catching
sight at last of inky forests far above
steep as faces
with the clouds stroking them and the glimmering
airy valleys opening out of them

waterfalls still roared from the folds
of the mountain
white and thundering and spray drifted
around us swirling into the broad leaves
and the waiting boughs

once I took a tin cup and climbed
the sluiced rocks and mossy branches beside
one of the high falls
looking up step by step into
the green sky from which rain was falling
when I looked back from a ledge there were only
dripping leaves below me
and flowers

beside me the hissing
cataract plunged into the trees
holding on I moved closer
left foot on a rock in the water
right foot on a rock in deeper water
at the edge of the fall
then from under the weight of my right foot
came a voice like a small bell singing
over and over one clear treble
syllable

I could feel it move
I could feel it ring in my foot in my skin
everywhere
in my ears in my hair
I could feel it in my tongue and in the hand
holding the cup
as long as I stood there it went on
without changing

when I moved the cup
still it went on
when I filled the cup
in the falling column
still it went on
when I drank it rang in my eyes
through the thunder curtain

when I filled the cup again
when I raised my foot
still it went on
and all the way down
from wet rock to wet rock
green branch to green branch
it came with me

until I stood
looking up and we drank
the light water
and when we went on we could
still hear the sound
as far as the next turn on the way over

I

I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

II

At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, --
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole's elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, --
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, --
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

-- Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
******* a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I'll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

III

The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;
Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, --
At first a swift rippling between rocks,
Then a long running over flat stones
Before descending to the alluvial plane,
To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the ***** bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, --
I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.

IV

The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around, --
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.
A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born falls on his naked ears.
His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.

All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-*****,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, --
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

For Grace Bulmer Bowers


From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts.  The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens' feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.

A pale flickering.  Gone.
The Tantramar marshes
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way.

On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship's port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.

A woman climbs in
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
"A grand night.  Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston."
She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture.

The passengers lie back.
Snores.  Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .

In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents' voices

uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

"Yes . . ." that peculiar
affirmative.  "Yes . . ."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."

Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

Ten years ago if you would've stopped me
on the street and said that I'd be stuck
at a dead end job, divorcing my husband of fifteen years,
and dividing three kids between two houses and twenty miles,
I would've spat in your face with laughter.

We never intend to have our life's plans crumble
before us, watching our spouses change into different
people and our children pick themselves apart
because all the words their parents say are fights
disguised in jabs and cracks at each other:
the time
they don't have,
the money
they don't have, the love
they
don't
have.

And in ten years, two people can fall apart the way
a river branches into separate streams, continuously flowing away
from their source, navigating bends and crossing the silted mud of life together
until they split up.

And everything we take for granted,
those necessities of life, are broken
down into their basic elements. Water is merely
hydrogen and oxygen. A marriage is but
two people
who can be divided,
simplified, classified, jarred up, studied,
separated.

Two streams diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not see this coming.

It just happens that way.
Life just happens
that way.

///
After born, a child subconsciously
engaged with the nature
she (nature)doesn't play well as usual,
all the time of his life
because someone somehow
plays the negative role with her

He who does not know the life,  
and doesn't know how and why
she originated the waterfall,
And generated a vigorous stream
but when someone cuts in the face of a river,
and moving water whatever he liked
otherwise, his own purpose ( in a negative sense)

Day by day the river moved slowly
slowly and slowly,
water didn't carry,
the overdue sediments toward the sea
day by day,
the river grew inflated
and becoming a silted bed

One day the rain came as cats and dogs
slowly and slowly,
it has made the flood over the flood plain
and swift away lands and roads
then the water has seemed useless

The child grew older
now he feels consciously
about the worst work
that someone did with her

And he (older child) thinks,
what does he feel?
when someone cuts in the face of a river
///
@Musfiq us shaleheen

Come home from eagle-throated distance,
The canoe-tip of the crescent moon scuds
Into the silted, mud-bed of heaven.
Her face-dream beside the pine trees
The mollusc of purpled wampum beads shining.  

Bury my hands, ninidji, in the eagle’s nest,
Carry my feeling words to her on wings.
Let her mix roots, berries, clay
and the feather of my hands
To paint her face with my words and these trees.

Or let my hands ripple like flat-fish
Above the silt-bed of her slim stomach,
Held there in radiant scaled warmth.
Lappihanne, the rapid water of our river heart,
Like an arrow that glides from the bow,
My people where the tide ebbs and flows.

To us both, the dark, golden edge of woods whispers, kuwumaras…
And the water arrow will never land,
But carried in my eagle’s hands,
I say kuwumaras, my love, and pierce through all darkness
To the empty path made full with the ripples of all who have passed.
My nika, swan of the woods, let us dive into the dark, golden sea
Of forever in the hills.

Dark draped the Ferry in confusion
on its final, fatal night.
Survivors spoke of a collision.
They knew that something wasn’t right.
A class of students on a trip
Bound for Jeju from Incheon
The Ferryman said to stay below
but he debarked and they’re all gone.
The ferry Sewol began to list
and water poured in through her ports.
Will anyone present forget the screams?
Souls in torment fill their thoughts.
Search and rescue soon became
a sad and grim recovery.
Their final moments were caught on cellphones
recovered from the silted sea.
The Ferryman has much to answer
About those students left behind
Perhaps in dreams he will be haunted
as young  drowned faces flood his mind.

Bartered tears with your love adorn
Twin streams from pure, spring founts born
Sappy pores gushing with showers of contrition on christening morn
Exchanged with vows that o'er time were weathered and torn
Briny waves of doubt crested; fealties' banks shorn
Now bottled memories silted with salty tears forlorn
Eroding tear ducts innundated then with passing time worn   
Brackish vapor distilled with rotting dreams; with nauseous fumes borne
Corroded promises mired in a dry bed of scorn
Cloaked in callous foliage; spited with thistle and thorn
Meeting at the jaded fork; once vibrant streams solemnly mourn
Stagnant puddles awaiting reincarnation; at next season's fertile rains reborn

Her memory is like the beauty of the silted Nile,
Of sacred blue lilies and heron
And skimming eyes of the crocodile.

///
Knowledge has grown with time
from our origin
and through evolution of nature
we have taken this information
and carry on
by generation to generation
with our gene
feelings are pinning you,
every second
every minute and every day,
gathered like clouds,
that has grown as rain in the horizon

Your brain has taken
millions of feelings,
making your mind,
taken those feelings,
bound all together magnetically

We discovered love, hate
pain, tears, laugh
even our words
all have made with emotion
accumulate of emotions are feelings
and millions of feelings make a mind
where there we make our love
where there we make our song
and there we make our life

But not all the seasons are same
the spring, rain and the winter
change over and being--
as we see through our life
neither always so rhythmic
nor always so romantic
neither too harmonic
nor too motioning
but all the time we carry emotions
that hurts our growing mind
changes its physical structure
and makes a new shape
as the ocean moves through the continents
and change its structure continuously--

We see tears flowing from her eyes,
you say pain,
that can also moves through vein
as the river runs through the vale
as like as water coming from a waterfall
moving like a stream
it has tasted salty,
those tears are to be torn
and turned to be stone
that has to be made the crystals,
crystalline through land and sea--

If those tears move too long and mad
it has formed layer
and has settled layer by layer
over an ocean bed
as the ripple marked,
silted and compact through time
grown as a dark shale,
black and compact
finally,we see our feelings has turned to the matter
///
@ Musfiq us shaleheen

Rain, thumping down,
Pressing grey prints,
Ocean, tears the sky,
Drowning with drinks
Of blue eye and salt
Taste, rude earthling
Song, takes too long.
Must I go on walking,
In gurgle paths spray,
Soaked, silted, ******,
Drabs colours running
In days raging of rain?

I don’t recognize you, but you’ve returned, oh it
must be you. No one else comes here but you.

Do you remember this music?

Kaleidoscopically gemmed it repeats, perhaps too
delicately—a quiet, tinkling knell, fishtailing through the
glimmering rain—mauve—soft-soaping the soil to darker clumps
beneath—soppy—slowly sinking so pretty, yet
terrifying now you’ve stepped into and through each
silted deepness, holding time.

This music begs you still—it has not stopped begging since—
to step further inside the wet loam (You clutch time now.)
To press down on it, in it, and listen tender the key you touched in
life between moments. It’s the reason you’ve returned.

You won’t, it’s not music, this feels like a baby’s head you’re on, you
cringe. About to cry.

Again, I’m sorry, but you have to—you have to feel it
scarily give a little. Feel it sink, infolding inside-out through its
thin pleura overflowing, always overflowing with the visceral
sap of everything on it—(I mean really everything.)—this
glistening ick, this frog-soil—moist, sickly cloying, susceptible
almost to light. And breathing.

It’s about to give out under your feet.

And kaleidoscopically gemmed it repeats, can you hear it?

Yes, you could be stepping on all their naked lungs, but there’s
nothing to fear, it’s an eternal field of their lungs—pink and gasping—
and that’s all there is here.  

Feel with your foot, like me. Is it alive? Or is it life? Listen, it
bleats a note. Why so sweet if, by touching it, we’ve made it drip
first truth from its tongue, look!—the blood of its eyes’ red
rivulets. Of its heart. The slightest breach it was. Barely an
opening

I’m sorry. I don’t mean to force you. If I was only me, I’d
leave it be, so it could spare us the look at the inner red that yokes
flesh to spirit. But you arrived here, and—listen, now it’s been
done, do not close your eyes.

You didn’t want to see this, I know—the sticky gum or muck that
licks over the fibrous bridges. Keeps them glued down and
invisible in the other world. It is all much better when the mucilage
does not ooze out. When the form is skin-tight, because that’s how
it works best. Without you probing its pores.

But now do you see, probing its pores, what you may find?
Look. Now do you see why the music has begged you?

What rests underneath there—what you may find in that dark
indigo clay which the shamans dug and pressed over their
blackened eyes in the night-trances—glows transparent somehow.
In pulses. Like Aurelia, the silver moon jelly.

Now it is just within your reach.

Light would pour to the other side, and their mouths would stiffen
with several infinite unintelligible syllables remaining stuck there
under their tongues. As it poured, they felt their blood replaced
in a surge with veinless essence, which sustained in its flow
through them something of precarious beauty—ascending, swirling
itself in air, then back into again, again returning to the home of homes
within them.  

The silver-moon-jelly-clay is continuously poised on the tip
(of not being clay).
About to break into splendor, into finally birth-giving of real breath.
Of meaning to breath, and to breathing.

This is what feeds, unknowing to them in that world, their field of lungs.
But you will know instantly when you feel it, that by feeling
(in feeling)
you have really always known.

Did you reach for it? Did you feel it in that second? You did not, I see
(you were so close!)
for now we’ve passed the origin symmetry and are sinking up! Going
deeply back up through the sticky goop with red glue in our hair,
through the moist-frog-ick-soil, choking dirt again, squishing loam
with our heads, shooting upward like falling, hearing lungs, and now
out, atop the surface again, in this bare garden that grows only under.

The skies above, still mauve, and the rain lips quietly the same
melody which, kaleidoscopically gemmed, repeats. It was all as quick as
nothing.

And, as I look at you, I see you’ve already forgotten
everything.

And now you’re leaving me! Fading back through the spectral
break in the clouds, whoever you were. Whoever it is you became.

I did honestly believe this was to be that one moment when, together,
we’d finally get to touch it. Press it like real sun to our blackened
eyes. I cannot tell you, it has felt like the one each time.

But I know to wait. I can wait. In this world I keep fluttering hope
in my hand. And you, whoever you’ll be, will return here.
You always do.
Do you ever remember why?
It’s because, when you leave through the clouds to go back to
that world, you are still. Always.
Clutching time.

Stunned by the oyster beds
Arrow-smiths lost their pledge,
the silted whispers of the dying
sighed as peacefulness.

Rain, thumping down,
Pressing grey prints,
Ocean, tears the sky,
Drowning with drinks
Of blue eye and salt
Taste, rude earthling
Song, takes too long.
Must I go on walking,
In gurgle paths spray,
Soaked, silted, ******,
Drabs colours running
In days raging of rain?

Find me as moon glides full
Crowning at the gateway of worlds
Eclipsed where creatures lurk.
I wade through dense thickets,
Unscathed and ethereal,
Self waxes and wanes
Until silted water
Runs clear.
Find me in a starlit riverbed,
Strewn on silent shores
Softened by darkness,
Aglow at first light where
Bright bodies camouflage
Constellations of thought and
Winking eyes.
Find me held, stocked on a shelf
In a catalogue of dreamscapes,
Snow globes, unknown worlds.
Find me in moments
Ripe with beauty,
A juicy morsel that feeds
Ancestors who linger and long for
Tastes of modern blood.
Find me traversing pages,
A neatly arranged
Expansion of a perennial
Universe within.

Rain, thumping down,
Pressing grey prints,
Ocean, tears the sky,
Drowning with drinks
Of blue eye and salt
Taste, rude earthling
Song, takes too long.
Must I go on walking,
In gurgle paths spray,
Soaked, silted, ******,
Drabs colours running
In days raging of rain?

You cast your name over
like silted reeds in the river,
on land
a thick covering of daub and wattle
sought your intention;
the wish to encase others in your space.
Such foolhardy fascination bears a cost,
like ubiquitous cochineal dye pools
Your dreams harbour barriers
as wide as your course strides permit,
the wilderness of banishment beckons
for as long as your  fortitude remains

Wallowing inside the blackest sleep
I see images grow large and transform
into what feels like reality. Each night
my brain is transfixed on tragedy
and the loss of a loved one, as though
my soul is craving tears, lucid dreaming,
a haunted atmosphere.
These moments remind my body
that is alive, full of breath, a moving
corporeal skeleton. The wilderness
of my bones hear the dark silted thoughts.
Each wave comes with white spinning stars
as a granular moon sinks into my spine.

walking on a silted riverbed
the sun comes up
flowers push through
[whispering, 'go, go']

the rain falls down
in straight sheets of black
the colours,
[though broken],
shine through
[purity]
[innocence]

no harm or foul
no tears or pain
no hate or waste

the white noise rings
let's cut it all down
from the web in the sky
that tells us all how

our lives will all end
the damage will ensue
everything will fall
[everything but me & you]

Rain, thumping down,
Pressing grey prints,
Ocean, tears the sky,
Drowning with drinks
Of blue eye and salt
Taste, rude earthling
Song, takes too long.
Must I go on walking,
In gurgle paths spray,
Soaked, silted, ******,
Drabs colours running
In days raging of rain?

Rain, thumping down,
Pressing grey prints,
Ocean, tears the sky,
Drowning with drinks
Of blue eye and salt
Taste, rude earthling
Song, takes too long.
Must I go on walking,
In gurgle paths spray,
Soaked, silted, ******,
Drabs colours running
In days raging of rain?

Rain, thumping down,
Pressing grey prints,
Ocean, tears the sky,
Drowning with drinks
Of blue eye and salt
Taste, rude earthling
Song, takes too long.
Must I go on walking,
In gurgle paths spray,
Soaked, silted, ******,
Drabs colours running
In days raging of rain?

First, you. The husk that splits
And out pours newness.
You and one thousand
Parallel: Pisces’ roe
Plucked from above and dropped
Into honeyed Nile to sip her moon-pale tears.
Your pallor Lunaire by sun’s ray unthieved
Inward glowing like tomorrow’s pearl.

Cry farewell to meandering cord then
Drop on silted earth’s cheek.
No words to wield. Now there is nothing
But those life-wrought hands that
Trace the candour of your flailing slouch.
Hands that
Tug on your round-eyed buoyancy
Hands that
Brand you with sour sorrows
Like footprints on the moon.

When you stroke my forehead and brush my hair with your fingers gently and bask my head in to your bare laps,
You whisper your breath along with the stories of mundane effervescence,
you don't sing the lullaby either,
I would just slip serenely into the sleep...
and it badinages you for having seen my eyes enwrapped to unravel the otherworldly..
Then the chortle spreads across your chin and your forehead enfolds pondering the love,
You lift my head from your lap and replace it with the pillow and
It causes a little turbulence in my body which recognizes the difference between your lap and pillow..
Gently you pat my chest like the mother dabs the child..
and with my heart sentient the transience of your palm,
I am transposed again to the silted life......(dreams)

Snowy sentiments silted up
the soft sediment of my senses,
sifting silently my dreams
of sensitive seduction,
solely to send my thoughts to shores
with coloured sands and stunning steep sights
with sweeps of sea, that swell so high
the sun scintillates the surface spray
shimmering and shining,
spreading over the horizon,
as the soughing of the wind swings seagulls,
swooping serenely southwards,
past the slabbery seashells
and slap-happy waves that swish up the beach,
soporifically smudging seaweeds
against the sleeping surface
of the smooth glacial rocks,  
spattering silky foam in spots
of saffron-tinted shapes, over their structures,
surreptitiously sinking into the saline cracks.

Margaret Ann Waddicor February 2013.

beside the slow flowing bushland creek
lay the body of a stock man who's build twas sleek
his remains were not found in eighteen ninety two
though a search for him did for days ensue

the mount he twas riding had been given a scare
by something that moved in the prickly pear
a heavy fall he took to the hardened soil
where his head bled in a torrential scarlet coil

on the sixteenth of May in nineteen eighty three
a bush walker stumbled upon the stock man's body
he found a tobacco tin in the creeks silted dirt
along with the remnants of his trousers and shirt

for years his family had waited to hear good news
that he'd been discovered within the bush land's muse
but of his passing they were told at a later date
a brown snake moving in the prickly pear sealed his fate

Oceans morning moon winking, at
sea gate keys rusted pleasures,
opening loves barnacled secrets, clutched
by tentacles intertwined forever silted

Rocks carved by crashing waves,
shadowing moments before instants, of
loves memory building sand castles
in the rain guided by passing masts

What could be drove her into the surf;
it was never the man as he was,
but what her heart told her was waiting
beyond rip tides and winds that didn’t care

Morning after’s had to wait for dawn,
nights alone knew that mornings alone
felt the same; but the hold of a ship at sea
at least carried her memory with him

Birds picking the lustfully heaving waters
at midnight, dodgy flowers in a stormy garden,
she could only wonder about such things,
while he could only wait for the night before

The wash behind drew life near, expectant;
she could feel the life in his wake, including
her own; but he knew what she could not
believe; this bow longs for her port

Izak Walton, it was his fault!  I was hooked. I read and re read The Compleat Angler. I could have quoted chapter and verse. Something had to be done! there was a brook nearby, at the edge of the wood it's crystal waters contained Red Throated Sticklebacks, I was thinking of something bigger, my mind was full of fifty pound Pike and Carp as fat as pigs, goodness knows where they were to come from, at that age my mind only took one step at a time.  I needed to dam the brook, that was certain, I borrowed Dad's new *****, building a dam couldn't be that difficult, I found a good place to start, where there had once been a silted up pool, If I built a good dam where the brook ran between high banks, it would soon start to form a wide pool.  I started digging on Saturday morning and dug all day. Dad used to call me his "little digger" but he spelled it differently!  After digging all day, I stuck Dad's new ***** into the turf by the dam and climbed an Ash tree so that I could get a good view as the dam filled up, which it did, quite quickly. No one had seen me at work, apart from the mad horse, which used to come charging up from time to time, It had broken the legs of the farmers son, the year before, but I used to jump into a hole in the middle of a very prickly gorse bush, and wait till it got bored, after five minutes it would wander off and chase the geese on the other side of the field. Then work could continue for another hour or so.  I began to get excited as the dam filled and my thoughts turned to fish, where could I get some fish? while my attention was occupied with thoughts of large carp the farmer suddenly appeared walking towards the dam and looking particularly bad tempered. I have to say that he was not the least bit pleased to see the results of my labours! He siezed my dads new *****, which I had so carefully broken in and he cut the dam wide open!  I still remember the roar as the water gushed out of my dam. The farmer had not seen me, I was sixty feet up in the tree, his gaze was focussed on the things nearer the ground. He didn't like me and he wore clogs, they could hurt if if he kicked you, (I speak from  painful experience. )  "Bernard, do you know where my new ***** is?" I shook my head. "Well do you?"  "I can't say that I do dad". Oh the shame of it has haunted me ever since!  Next time I build something, I will need to find a better spot. A tree house might be just the thing! more anon.

Underbelly of seabirds
As
White blue grey sky
Scrolls above.

Feathers frolic on
Thermal waves
Unknown to eyes
On Southend pier.

Rusting legs step out to
Sea
Swell and cresting small
Over silted bed

How easy to distill the past
sifting out impurities
so a clean silky edge
will soothe another’s tongue.

Serve up what flatters
spit out distasteful lapses
swallow raw memories  
let them sink

deep into the silted
heart of gray.

The lies we
tell each other,
tell ourselves.

We are all revisionists
editing our histories, omissions
catered to the prevailing
whims of taste and culture

until intimacy unmasks us.

A soft, imploring cry
peels from far and wide
from the silted lives of
mercenaries and conscripts,
the coagulated blood of still lifes
leached from stented veins
and strained for national pride

A quiet, solemn echo
bounces off re-sodded hills
and re-capped mountains
of voices muted in their prime
so that indentured revelers
might joyfully trumpet
an unrequited melody
of garnished freedom
and varnished liberty

The curdling wind plays taps
to the itinerant bones
on reefs and ocean bottoms
now hollowed by corrosive waves
of land-faring vagabonds who
continuously pare their calcified genes

Bottled tears that will never drain
remain untapped on distant shores
as their pilfering descendants
salt the museums and memorials
with their gratuitous patronage

please let me apologise
i am unable to write
well of  today's suggested
prompt, but write i must
i made a mental deal.
i am meant to
be writing a terza rima
but at present the form
is beyond me....

my creative flow is
silted up and sluggish,
mindless and murky
just muddy thoughts,
caught upon a logjam
of tired emotion.

and i feel unable to
produce,
a  credible rhyme,
let alone......
tercets with a braided
rhyming scheme.

but a deal is a deal....

to day i plod,
from dawn to dusk,
the world a beating rod

upon the broken husk,
that once, was my mind
now muddied, mush,
gouged by memories,
broken elephantine tusk.

i feel, so blind, so blind
stuttering,stumbling,
about in the dark
chased by ....

see this is the mud...
....in which
i am swimming...

so sorry to you,
as you can see.....
having......
.......a bad write day!!

At the silted banks of river Nile,
I'd sung to the glory of Lucy;
I'd soared high over the echoing Savanna
and fought and bled for Shaka Zulu.
I was first to push back abyss,
the last to be ripped away. I'll
return one day, I'll bring the rest.