Early Warning

Not a virile blooming of grass-hue
but a graceless, flesh-sick rising
from the ruptures, as life-lines grouted badly
by a weekend without washing.
These things build up over my broken points
stay the hand of healing on my flesh.
At least my bones do not feel cold;
infection works her own system
of heating-the opposite of under-floor
we wouldn’t want it to get that way.

 

Influx

The trains cavort on borderlands
playing the boundaries like needles
drawn over a cat’s gut cello.
Each moment you cross, you should feel it
each moment you infringe, you should feel it.
quaint dalliances are long past, the fissures
thrown up in monumental 2D lines
carved on a map, split on the faithless coal
littering the land with fragments
of sundrenched afternoons leading to black
black nights, gathered around the humble stove.
these nuggets, these flecks of burning land
extricated from the ties that bind
beneath the soil, together turn your hands
black in defiance as you turn them.
back over the borderlands you go
taking tokens of forbidden walks
drag the coal over the cat’s gut cello
the growl and scrape reminds you
reminds us, of that cauterized home.

 

Dark Sky

Silence does not hold this sound.
Where language fails, nerves splay flat
Sieving sensation straight to the dome
Where it clusters, as gravity does its work.
Even the trees are hushed
In this darksome place, all stilled
Roots dampened, ends ceasing their search
For the quiet time, when the firmament blooms with light.
No other star has warmed a creature’s veins
On our small world; no tides have been brought round
By any moon than our pallid watcher.
What reaches us, blanched, glisters through the gloom
Refracted through a million empires’ lives
but brightness persists; it is there above
Around us.
Not for us, for nothing, purposeless
Magnificent. Our grubbing lives
Knots of years, splinted by tradition
heed the call
of nothingness, extravagant, nuclear fires
scorched out before the first monkey spilled
its seed, leading to us
in cosmic time
they live, still, in our remembered skies
Mesopotamia mystics, Babylonian wizards gazed up
and
thought the very same as us
nothing has changed.

 

The Haymaker

A raised eye to the clouds
speaks to all of us.
We all gaze up and read
Some contorted meaning
in glass-edged clouds plying
their tread on the firmament.
But the haymaker sees the argot
Splayed in the atmosphere
which guides his every movement
a rope-walk, an untethered response
to nature’s mercurial movements.
It takes years, and the testimonies
of tradition, pruned and pared
of destitution, to reconcile
the ancient, transcendent words
etched in the sky
with the work which needs committing
among the living;
a tender brush on a lock of his wife’s straight hair
does two jobs. Whilst bringing gently back
late, fire-huddled nights when both their girls
had left the house, it speaks to him
of bluster on the hills, and a need
to expedite
the gathering of blades, drying
under the smile of the sun.
A bolt of iron among blue
on a balmy late-spring morning
warns of rain, sends him reeling
to gather up his ricks. A glimmer
of salmon-shade at five
might counsel of a second flare of sunlight
to nourish his spare scrap of land once further;
to sharpen up for one more round of mowing.
His mind will phase
from practical decision
to moments of his life shared with gusto.
His life, buried in the land
as he reaches roots out
linking with those around.
So language sluices
through another age
but truly stays a solid kind of same.
The silent skies do not hide; their stains
are open to a quiet, learning eye.

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