In The Poetry

Dante’s ‘heaven’

We two fallen through earth’s core
beached here at Mt Purgatory
blink back antipodean light
days on end.

There’s sky enough to dive into
islands in green-blue water
to swim to.

Heaven to be earthly
looking up nightly
at the blackness
milky with stars.

In the Library

for Octavio

There’s a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one had opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the [...]

Vigil

Now you are gone
your small perfections inveigle me:
curve of your eye-lid closed in sleep
widens to my horizon.

Sleepless
I used to watch those pupils move,
shifting deltas of blue veins,
blindly scanning my face.

Some nights I came near,
my lips in touch
with your pulsing lids
to catch the drift of your dream.

The Lost Room

Someday I will find it, the lost room,
unlocked along the long forgotten
hallway of the half-remembered
house, whose windows rise moonfully
over an ashen field at the end of a blue

invisible road. And the map I’ll fold
will be a grid of bone and blood.
And the master there will know me -
his study grained with memory, [...]

At the junior school I went to we had a very excitable science teacher and no equipment which was a bit of a bewildering combination. And he used to give us these little missions – they weren’t experiments they were more like missions. And one day he asked me and another kid to go outside [...]

Ice on the Beach

One single sheet of sprung light.
Touched here with the toe of your boot
it hurts in a distant part.

Dream stuff, with its own internal acoustic.
Striking it with a stick raises
a shocked note, a white bruise under the skin -

the physiology of ice on sand
is strange, we have not mapped it.
The sea can only [...]

Continuum

The moon rolls over the roof and falls behind
my house, and the moon does neither of these things,
I am talking about myself.

It’s not possible to get off to sleep or
the subject or the planet, nor to think thoughts.
Better barefoot it out the front

door and lean from the porch across the privets
and the palms into the [...]

Of poetry

Great poems are often extraordinarily simple.
They carry their openness
with both hands.
If there is a metaphor lounging in a doorway
they step briskly past.
The boom of generals
and presidents with their rhetoric manuals
will go on sowing the wind.

The great poems are distrustful of speech.
Quietly,
like someone very old
who has only a few hours left [...]

I do enjoy writing riddle poems. This particular one I usually read without the title, which I will do now, and without the final word, but this time I’ll put in the final word.

Who dips, dives
swoops out of space,
a buzz in his wings
and sky on his face;
now caught in the light,
now gone without trace,
a [...]

Wind

This is the wind, the wind in a field of corn.
Great crowds are fleeing from a major disaster
Down the long valleys, the green swaying wadis,
Down through the beautiful catstrophe of wind.

Families, tribes, nations and their livestock
Have heard something, seen something. An expectation
Or a gigantic misunderstanding has swept over the hilltop
Bending the ear of the hedgerow [...]