Poems Unread Since the 1980s
Cold Bliss
I remember walking with her
hand in hand
through the snow-gowned night
under arching campus streetlamps
casting dim pyramids of light
on the aisle of our unknowing.
She was 18
and so was I,
aging on white wine
and her urgent black hair.
I did not care
to disturb the pristine path
that led to her door
where fingers of ice
ringed the eaves
like a necklace of diamonds.
For it was enough
that she stood there with me
to share the cold --
or perhaps far too much.
What I might say,
what I might do --
it was for me, the tongue-tied boy-man,
to do the wooing,
as these things go.
Glad in the fact of her,
I leapt over her father’s frozen, empty car,
sliding sled-like
down the far side
as she laughed.
It was then
I stopped the spin of the earth
and fell into her red mouth,
a happy grave.
The years died between us
like puffs of crystallized breath
but my remembering
walks hand in hand
with an ancient innocence.
In Her Wake
(September 1987)
We walk down,
drawn by the flat lake
lying low
under edging dusk.
Towel-wrapped, she slips
into the wide-hipped canoe
as I man the stern.
The offered paddle
she grasps naively;
I instruct.
The surface glides us darkly along
the ribbed shadows of the shore
steeped with peeling birch.
Our longing strokes lap
the sheet-smooth water,
deepening with the fading light;
the silence of the wild
swallows
our tapering trail of words.
She turns, she whispers,
and the tiny whirlpools spin.
I delve my fingers wrist-deep
like a paintbrush
under the skin of the darkening glass
to cool my racing pulse.
Pushing her on,
I chase the face of the night.
One Woman
One woman is my riverbed
spread with the flesh of fear,
to lie beside, to tell my lies,
and shed my confessional tear.
I wade the weeds of reverie,
I sip the bend of her hip;
I follow the swim of her spiralling neck,
I skim the wave of her lip.
She nets me in the narrows
of my lazy, floundering deceit.
Against the reeling dark I tug
my lines of cloudy conceit.
I pour myself down a stonecold well,
the parched throat of despair.
I trace the vapour of her bones
to a pouting ledge; beware
the catching curves of silky fish.
One woman is the school of life:
her darting glance of stolen time
still taunts me like a wish.
I rest my restless head of words,
an unfinished spineless tome;
from milky sleep I drink a dream
of drowning halfway home.
Leaving
Sipping darkness feeds
the tide of the breeze.
The golden leaves of fall
breathe in the escaping eve.
Unburdening arms of elm beseech
the mask of mourning cloud
worn by the pock-faced moon.
Nightfall sky
fills my harvesting eye
settling like an ember
in the wintering cup of sleep.
The Face of the Water
The solitary bathing boy
squats ankle-deep
in the blue plastic pool
squinting
under the motherless September sun,
unremembered.
From his navel
a knotted nylon cord
hangs,
brushing the face of the water.
Blades of grass
floating loose
green-cool on the face of the water
stick to his shins
like bars of captured time.
On the face of the water he sees
the roof of bearded clouds
bear down
on the fretful rising wind.
A sole tear
consoles the rain.
The Sleep of the Vigilant
An ultraviolet corona
rings the brow of the dozing boy
like a garland of bloody ice.
From behind a one-way mirror
he stares deeply into the distance:
fossils
figurines
gargoyles
chameleons
columns of porcelain silence
frozen in impossible
impostures of infinity.
Soundlessly
the inching worm of terror
hugs tight
the boney rungs
of the aspiring spine,
as the bug-eyed raven
circles.
Coiled in vigilant sleep,
exiled flesh dreams the screaming black sky,
slit open like an anonymous letter
by the dead white eye of the moon.
The Glass Nursery
Tiny cruel gems of memory
I wear like cats’ eyes,
flushing the mad moths
from the creeking attic floorboards,
gnawing the trodden
paper thin
wastes of time.
Guarding silent nights,
hapless angels
behind their fear
hide, aging.
The three hinges of the polished door
sprout like perfect hairless heads;
untold storeys climb
the gilded palace of the innocent.
I tread the beds of white lily,
arching stems unbroken.
My body nurses its own yearning,
tugging its petals singly,
tying dying love-me-knots.
Crescent mouth of moonish grief
sighs on the shoulder of dusk;
the flowing bend of hanging hair
portends
the ungiven gift
the unblown kiss.
A burning fan of light
creeps under the distant door
to die
as dimming claws
at the feet of sleep
Images
Images leak from the dark room
of a pillowed head,
bathed in chemical
neuro-transmitters.
Slides projected on the walls of a skull
draped in blood-red light
flash like phantasms
expelled from home.
Hugging the night,
posters, paintings, pictures
burst and dissolve
into skeletons of ghost-flesh.
A single scalding tear falls from a
titanic iceberg,
stabbing the blue pagoda of a hard china plate
at the precise moment
when a child
goes mad.
Clock Wise
I circle clockwise
the oval mirror of memory,
conjuring her woodland face
fringed with leafy curls.
Unwound by the evening,
her hands
move perfectly
over the smooth of my back,
condensing
years into tears,
days into come-what-mays,
hours into flowers,
minutes into minuets,
seconds into firsts.
Her earth-deep eyes
turn coyly upward
when my mouth meets
the curve of her cheek.
I murmur her name,
a chime to the timeless night
that sleeps alone
between us.
Sleepwalk
Revealed by the receding tide
leeching into the stream
I am driven into a dream,
no one
by my side.
I grow old
stepping
down the stairs
and wading up the street
sitting at tables
at desks
at feet
and I eat my words as I sleep.
I walk on a line
once around the clock
and I dream of dreaming walks.
I roll my body
through steel doors
like a wheelchair of bone.
I push my feet
through the waves of grass
like wooden ships.
A belt of godless cloud
rings the red lid
of the sunset;
I pace the arctic circle
kicking the edges of the cycling seasons.
The empty circles
trap the squares;
the squares encircle
my ankles,
my knees,
my guts,
my chest,
and choke
the trembling throat
that dares promise
a kind awakening.
I
I seek myself as a wound seeks a balm;
I claim my mad father in the faces of friends;
I hitchhike alone the storylines of my palm;
I unveil clues in what a veined leaf portends;
I bleed the tears of men, darkly driven underground;
I stalk ghosts as I sleep, divining the vibrant dead;
I hand-pick the fruits of my labour, wrists tautly bound;
I seal the cellar door shut, heeding sweet silent dread.
Inkblots
Remember when,
your marriage dead,
we squeezed
piece by piece
your Queen Size boxspring mattress
and the shapely legs of the Victorian four-poster
up the icy steps
to the empty attic,
your sorry new digs,
crouching and puffing and bending,
manfully gouging
the compliant plaster walls?
Remember how you howled
when I suggested
the dark seminal moments
spread across your trundle
like Rorschach inkblots
revealed
hard DNA evidence of flings past?
Or was it just
the dry stuff of wet dreams?
As Pure As the Driven:
My Life as a Courier
Every day,
dead or alive,
I’m paid to drive,
minimum rage,
delivering myself,
and the odd package,
from evil.
I shoot up and down
the driveways
the thru-ways
the highways
the skyways
the one-ways
as if there were
a way.
I seem not to tire of
striving
and never
arriving.
Still,
no one knows
my secret:
I’d much rather idle
like a cradle
in July.
Fearing
the worst,
I drive myself hard,
dying to be first,
feeding the dispatcher
with restless speed,
besting my own questing.
Do I drive
to deny a lie?
Will I be charged with
thinking and driving?
Why does Mercury squirm?
A zipper of white
stitches the hardened arteries of asphalt;
rivers of drivers
trafficking in hope
sputter and fume,
taking a toll
on my transmigrating soul.
I pass on lunch;
in the swoon of mid-afternoon
I sponge a speck of madness
from a windshield fly.
I tunnel
through auto-erotic memories
of a shy green-eyed woman,
red ribbon insinuating amber hair,
stopping for no one.
I map my future;
I seek a sign;
I yield
to a wish
to be transported.
In the passing lane
I blow past the pain,
heedless of the cost;
in the rearview mirror
I glimpse the face of the human race
and pretend I am not lost…