Monday
it’s hard when the words don’t come, but when they arrive,
bird-light, drunk on themselves, tolling like a bell in the sombre day,
that is when everything makes sense of itself, and all the suffering
that you endured and read about runs off into the distance
horse-like, ethereal, but still humming beneath drops of light
that fell on the stiff and frozen grass; all the books are open in
the house, they sit on the dark table at angles, their pages
like wings above a landscape of maple and honey – I’ll tell
you now, that in the next room a child is waking, a beautiful
interruption on a Monday afternoon; soon, we will walk out of
the door into the cold air, tread the path towards the granite church
before crossing the road near the thatched houses; you’ll sit
on the swing and journey through time; your mother will look
from you to the view, the hills sinking and rising like some
mythical animal, forever elusive, unmeetable; the clouds will
sit as white sheets above, and they will shine and shine and shine
First published in Obsessed with Pipework
***
Opening
After ‘Seawall’ by Richard Diebenkorn
Containable, how the sea forms a wall
& an opening sky
a slice of green could set the scene
for land, how the grass criss-crosses
with disturbance as the pigment on
the wash of lilac-blue emits light.
Part of a sequence shortlisted for the Periplum Pamphlet Competition
***
writing you
how to become the words of the psalm
or the bird’s low flight over stammering
light – how to be nature’s lift and tread,
the work of the dead, the final cloud he saw
a glimpse of sky; how to write his eyes?
sea-blue, cornflower, lapis lazuli; or
show the things he loved? the sloping
brown of the deer’s form, white-spotted
loping through the indigo night; the fields
only lit by the moon; the flare of a rabbit’s ears
as the sun comes up; the light that no longer
falls on him; deep in nature’s grave,
dark with ivy – I could lie here;
instead, I piece over the stillness of your
final days; the way things begin to fade
before departing; a single glass on the table
a newspaper, the pages stained;
CDs at angles by the stereo; your chair,
wooden with a rounded back; how to say
love, goodbye; be here, always –
Longlisted for the Keats-Shelley Prize