Ironing -a woman’s half hour

Space/Time has glass edges

and creases made not hewn

by the wash folding,

folding and extending,

extending back the wave

of all longing

orbiting at a waterfall’s edge,

cliff cave and curtains

when she lets 
the light

come in....Attention 
will wander away

from the last frame as I wonder,

I wonder when remembering

and forgetting waltzes

ebb and flow, no chorus

singing hallelujah, just 
impatient wasps, a big 
point to make, staring 
at the end of someone else's 
queue, waltzers, no towers

to fall in cartoon slow mo,
singing 'Wasp' instead 
of Take this Waltz, this Waltz

always, when a spin cycle

does not take forever

always is another detonator

detonating and the tumbling

and tumbling by the window,

ironing, like all statues tumbling,

tumbling into a ditch or river - this is

for the top drawer, the shattered glass,

a woman’s half hour folding

and folding and folding.

She tracks an Orbit

Light years from you and me, her eye to a telescope,

she tracks an orbit and discovers a spiral galaxy.

We are going round in circles, so she begins

to determine the mass of objects, their weight

in relation to one another, while I see Mount

Clara, clear water and rocks full of gems.

Adaptive optics, and see her waterfall

a white arrow laser shower chased by

jumping lunchtime boys arching their toes

over slated ledges. Her eye to a telescope

she may imagine quiet on a lagoon's rocky bank,

a stormy energetic stem of a cliff

and warmer waters in shallow gentle edges.

She may see the shade, swim through the blind,

dip under thunder to cave, rest on the wet

shelf of sofa rock and watch the light come in.


06

Not yet the hiss of summer lawns

When the moon

is wet with the tears

of its own shadow

the crescent of our strawberry

moon missed

shines – the light

white mist from a cracked fossil

and a nod, un fathom able

until a nightingale’s song

- this song flashes

through the litmus

paper thank you

rust to blue

with a ribbonned bow –

for in a drawer,

next to the Kimono

an expanding meadow of poppy

unwrapped a yielding more precious 

than Monet, a wildfire 

or door in a field of Vincent’s iris

where you are. The breeze 

to your back is May to June’s 

gentling and the sweetness 

of summer wine.

Harmonics

My polyphony butterflies your passing note.
There's my 7th - a needy hybrid - jazzy, unpredictable,
suspended; hovering over the wrong chord,
propagating like Coltrane overlapping;
cascading, bubbling volatile streams
and vulnerable, when I meant to take it slow.

The mystical quality of harmony pointed to the planets,
heavenly music, or a musical outpouring of love,
while I was busy wondering about chaos, structure,
and moments of perfect understanding. It is simple.
Primary triads are colourful progressions of chords
heading to the dominant, and back again.

You are my tonic; the bagpipe drone, and the voice.
I know refrains of parallel notes are the lines of our separation.
They say it is a fault of the eye to see lines converging,
as I say it is a fault of the ear, all along the bend of a harp.
How deaf are we to the magnetic aspect of notes,
leaning back into the music of another?

We chose chord progression, and searched
for the third melody note to hit two drones,
We became robust major three note chords, or fragile minor
triad tones, each dominant, each a tonic. We knew nothing,
wrote it down, and they say they hear Nature breathing,
augmented or diminished, in every breath. Play on, I say.

They say it is a fault of the eye to see parallel lines converging,
as I say it is a fault of the ear, all along the bend of a harp.



09?

Here it's all Mango

Here, it is all mango and Bob Marley, blue skies, boats bobbing,
palm tree leaves stretching, pointing, tickling, waving
walkways of branches buzzing with the feeding of baby doves.

Canary yellow cheeky sparrow baubles sparking the dark places,
sunlight vitality through the clouds in bursts of the brightest warmth -

This sun on a canvas is how one should feel standing by the shoreline
when ones dreams are wrapped in a twig boat,
saying, "it is not a boat, and it is sailing to the past"
while she shakes her head, smiling, painting Afrika
on the beach. It could end like this,

this day of their watercolour, she remembering the lilies and bridges
running over a warland, raindrops splattering the pond,
or she painting the sunset – crimson, all wedges
of luscious oils from behind the wind shield of the School Bus,
thick swirls of evening icing the cake; but it is still

not late enough. He is watching while hidden stars navigate
his little boat bobbing, at last disappearing on the turning tide,
and she, dreaming of the bougainvillea colours draping the wall,
the dividing line of day and night yet to slip fruit over the horizon,
colours bleeding into the orchard through a brickwork chink.

Why to look for the exuberant shine defining the shape
of exactly how they stand when the ocean is before them?

To see shape in this light and remember it anywhere,
to feel it again in the flicker of an eyelash, or in another
small hand, as a backdrop to any liquid scene:

He asks if this is where they came in Midsummer night's dream,
laughing at children riding donkeys for two whole English pound.

Her Grandmother lived in a house behind a wall like this,
and holding a hand, peeks through; the pollen dusting her hair.
We wait for this; singing songs on the way home, she asking,
if this was called 'The Ocean', an 'Estuary', which London station
would she need, to see The Thames River like Will Yam Blake?

a little face lighting up that it was only a short walk south,
days later, sneaking out the back gates one afternoon with her mates
to see if they could find some smog, a Tyger, Tyger –

- while here, it is all mango and Bob, Marley, blue skies, boats bobbing,
palm tree leaves waving walkways of branches buzzing
with the feeding of baby doves.

08

For when you wanted to say

For when what we wanted to say

would take an awful lot of ‘tell’.

a soapbox, an apple-cart of overturned words

too showy for a time when metaphors

are overdressed for funerals, nor fit for our joy.

Where to begin? It’s Spring.

There’s birdsong and rebirth, pumpkin seeds and planting,

for when, what we wanted to say

should be scooped up in handfuls of berries, not kneaded into earth;

when seedlings are re-homed in wishes and signposts

pointing this way – for when, what we wanted to say is

it is this way hope returns.

05/2020

To Do List

• I make a To Do list,

collated from the past:

a Fish and a Rusting Barge;

and from the present, a long list of essentials,

bullet pointed, to be prioritised,

including words wise now not to use.

• The gap between bullets is so important

but unfairly placed

way down the machine gun

trail, past a blank page, and a wish.

Someone will surely write some of those,

so I have this poem to write about a fish –

a really ugly fish, but until I begin

and find a way to properly explain

the colour of ugly rust – I must leave it. Bulleted.

• In favour of what is less urgent.
• (Next includes bullets of unused words.)

So, far down, and also urgent, it is all about Harry,

a lockdown story so extraordinary,

but the fish, the really ugly fish,

has just sloped by, flat and feigning elegance.

Top fins are never ugly, cutting

the dense shield of water – neither

was famous Fat Mary, the fish at dusk, concealing

an underbelly the colour of…........rust, slinking through the flotsam.

• Then there is a list of poems – all Tarot cards,

which wait and shuffle like discarded side salads.

poems containing loops of inedible nettles

and cabbages, all coming up roses. (Never mind

the catastrophe of the vegan lasagne  - layers

and layers of gloop with no bite, no crust.)

• With Harry, it’s a long and incredible story of lust,
• until shortly, when who knows they may love and marry,
• so quickly, before she leaves tomorrow, Harry

has fallen, via lockdown Zumba and Zoom

with a match/flirt/fling/Fin from Belgium,

which is exactly

where I ought 

to begin:

Boy Poet

A boy I knew who slipped through nets, much stronger
than his finest fishermen's thread, jumped through loops
woven by my woman's fingers, and found himself,
and willed himself to fall somehow for me. A boy poet -
classically beautiful, his French words in that feminine hand,
fountain-pen-faded ink-loops alive on tattered sheets.
When he wrote, his English wept like a woman
in black by the side of a grave - or danced Tango
in fire traces, fencing light across the page, and so,
I really did not, could not, see him coming straight for me:
"Your cocoon of silk will melt in the warmth of my heart's mouth
and like dust I die to drift the breezy blossoms, to settle
my raw petals on the bottle edge glass of your sill.."
Surely, he had meant to rest on another window ledge?
How poetic a way to analyse my tired tenement walls!
He painted landscapes, drew spider diagrams, just to explain it all
until I found him sat by one of my legs; doe eyed to my fawn.
Two deer and two arrows, with no hunting gun,
only a fawn affectionate who could just see one.
There was no cherry-pink upon the casement ledge.
One blade and one phial; so quickly, we were dead.

This year's walk...Spring (08)

08

We have walked through memory mansions and turned antiques in the light of the sun examining their principles of creativity, finding the life force in objects, reading tapestry stories carpeting stone walls. We have climbed the staircases of turrets, carved slit windows through rock and surveyed the historic landscape of home, the stone walls running veins through woodland and pasture, those stacked bricks of mountains and fallen towers.

We have strolled gardens of abandoned beauty, the magnificent design of labyrinth and fountain, where Rose planted gardens for the blind to know the shape and movement of fauna there, to walk alone through the ploughed fields home.

We have descended to The Library’s damp walls, oak table, solid chair, candlelight, quill, ink and parchment, sliding wooden ladders to the highest shelves. We have sat with them in the silence of just before dawn running our fingertips down the index pages and spines of heavy books. We have felt the cold rheumatoid hands, the pains of others, and the absolute shades of grey in visions. Lantern light, Oil of Atlas cedar wood warming cherry fires - the comfort of hand sprung armchairs at the hearth, and lifting the sash on Victorian windows, burning manuscripts in summer fires.

We have floated by the mottled silver of mirrors to kitchen’s pantry and all still life, melting the wax off apples with the hunger of an eye, slicing loaves and cold meats for a wooden tray. We have made baskets, for rivers, and gratitude, poured milk from terracotta jugs, and at sunset goblets of wine from simple urns, wooden cups, blackjacks, flagons and measures. We've seen the fleur de ville metal suits of armour’s thirsty arms outstretched, and the flowery cup of love pouring black skies milky white with stars.

We have waded through flooded cellars, drowned in passages of wine, seen Gunpowder plots and walked the tinder box planks of theatres, stepping out alone onto an empty stage. We have played where The Pit bears witness, fruit is thrown, the light shines, and people pray their own way on the dusty long way home.

Through stone walls, burning slats and cobbled streets we have wondered like children at the moving stories in wallpaper, roasted chestnuts and sweet potatoes, roots on metal drums, flown a year of nature, the changing man with the changing woman, kerosene, fire jugglers, the sweat of labour, the sweat of love.

We have walked through dewy grass on a Spring morning and listened to the cicada on starry nights, We have danced in rays of the moon, pulled truth from weaves of light, found joy in the colours of the sun, the rain, the footsteps we take to walk our very own rainbow. Hail! Spring!


mar08 Archived comments for We have walked…

What a Life!

What a Life!
It all started
A long, long, time ago
In a moment of absent mindedness
I believe..

First there was Darkness
I am told
And think we lived like moles
Underground, or undersea
Like whales playing..

What a Life.
It all began
With the first story told,
Something given in absent mindedness –
I forget.

Then there came the first
Taste of Air
Flavoured like an awakening
Remember?
Each sense opening?

What a life.
The pain of it!
It's hard to believe
Dolphins play smiling.
Swimming in absent mindedness
I forget.

Then there came the Light
Touch of love's care.
I believe we sang songlines
In marooned languages,
Tuned words lost in absent mindedness
Remember?

What a Life!

*
'86?

Don't remove the Green from the village

On the ^ belt
In your ^ house
Near the village ^
Your unripe ^ gage
Is attracting ^ flies.

You will not need ^ fingers
For this ^ revolution.
You are young, unseasoned,
A new ^ horn
Given the ^ light
By the ^ eyed ladies living close by.

(It is the ^ grocer you should watch for
He is a bigger ^ eyed monster
Who says there is enough ^ 'Ery'
Here already.)

Welcome to this ^ market town
Where you may make,
And spend your ^ pound.

Latina

At whatever hour, whenever

there is Latin music,
she is Zorro
or a beautiful woman with a waist.
The colour red appears
either on a skirt, the white of a shawl
or the pink of a flower on the earth
and she dances a while
in a courtyard,
through the ceramic of low doorways,
over moonbacked teracotta tiles.

The air is garlic and magnolia.
The shadows may smoke a cigar.
Whether it is beans and rice,
a kitchen or a fire; gherkin,
goulash, paprika,
chili, tapas or tortilla,
she salsas.

In any gypsy recipe
the night is ripe with lips;
the spirit of revolution always,
in the revolution of her hips.

a poem about ears

Who is listening to what another has to say?
One in a million is a good pair of ears
drinking slow sips in the pauses of the every day.
So full of our selfish-selves, mostly all that is displayed
is a vulture’s capture of a corpse, revived
for rapacious ears awaiting instant sound bites.
Easy to latch a beak around the meat
of what one wanted to say in the first place.

When I talk, it really is to a brick wall.
On the same deafness, peaceful or angry words will fall.
So I speak less and less,
until my muteness nods in agreement with itself
and I practice the art of hearing like a novice.

Reading is where it is at – finding voices that slip the barricade.
The years shrivel the will to hear the same, over
and over and over again; except
there's a song from the distant past
or the understanding voice of a big eared friend;
except the words that slip the chinks
I chisel with my quiet hammer,
to let you in.




ancient poem

petra - ichor

shit fan fan shit duck water flows under the bridge petrichor's oil slick

Door in a Field

It’s not so dramatic, of course - the door was in a field,
the middle of a huge field, just there in its frame, slightly
ajar; and so unwelcome guests would leave quickly,
the broom tucked in the groove left for hinges
to feel their weight; creak, loosen,
and sense some movement in the breeze,
because there was a breeze in this particular field,
and I knew it was a field because it was green,
not black and white like in the dreams people have,
not in colour either, or there would have been sky, some trees,
- and cows would have appeared chewing the cud,
- and although this now has already happened,
- and other things too, people running around
from tree to cow, building things, having revolutions,
I left the door right there slightly ajar, and watched
from a wicker chair like Van Gogh's, upset
with how the field is so easily cluttered with trees,
cows, and people running round in circles
when I thought what I wanted was a clean frame
to imagine irises like he painted
by walking backwards away from canvas,
or seeing you walking through the door, looking just fine,
carrying some shopping bags from your favourite place
somewhere in the green field that I was on the very edge of,
wondering where the door had gone, and why I was
sitting by the banks of the same river watching the litter pass,
scuffing trainers on the brickwork, waiting for the ferryman,
trying to cats-cradle beams of light.

2008

long time no see 

poem

Boom Boom Betty and Pot Shot Pointer - Petanque 2007

Boom Boom Betty, 88; stops the game,

raises one wet finger, stills; checks the wind,
tips her hat, grins; swings her string,
and picks up her hot golden ball
on a dangling silver magnet; walks, limps a bit,
reins in the distance down the court,
steps into the loop, stoops, aims,
and Boom!!! Boom Boom Betty fires her shot:
“Tirez!” cheers the crowd, busy,
“Bravo Betty!” the spectators sport
as a galaxy of balls circling the Jack,
split, knocking the little wooden Cochonnet
into the pit. Snags a shell, hopscotches
the scorched path, yells, plops over
the cliff, and hits the shock of ice-cold sea.
“What a shot!” says the Cochonnet, stunned,
“What a blast” says the Crowd; all sound,
“What a shooter” frowns the Cochonnet;
winks, drinks tea in the underwater gallery,
drowns. Takes a deep breath, rebounds.
Impasse: The Game On the Ground.

All still, last shot, Pot Shot Pointer goes for
the roll; stands, tennis before the serve,
in a circle chalked; the boardwalks hush.
12 All - match point stuff – poised. All
surveyed, the game played, Pot Shot stands,
quiet and dazed; eyes trance, last chance,
to the left or to the right? Avoid the bounce,
trip the hum of the restless crowd; Quiet
now. Head bowed. No sound. Prays...
the middle way. Hush; come to my arms
"Two cheese and pickle and a cup of tea,
Please," Pot Shot Pointer gets the roll, tea
hot, hears the news, hears the shots. Loud.
The Crowd Falls. And from the Speaker:
"Pick up your belongings from the Lost and
Found." Impasse: The Game on the Ground.

2007

Sensitive

We always hear the gunshots

And then the jackboots

Striding over goose steps,

And the goosesteps across my heart

And goosebumps in my throat.

And the goose fat in the pan.

And the goose.

Just stop. Watch.

Close your eyes. These goose
steps are not dance moves.

(Unnecessary) Divisions of Labour

Father
Love is...
a simile - like
the NHS

Mother
Love is...
a verb

Jane Austin Smiles

Part of the seduction of fiction is in identification.


Who wouldn't need to feel pretty downtrodden
to identify with the threatening surroundings
of dark Gothic passages, the screams of a virgin,
separated from her family, at the mercy of society,
running through the drafty corridors of the 18th century,
and everything bleak, bleak, bleak?

She gave us the modern heroine, each good one
since Elizabeth, with all her wizened wit.
Elizabeth, with her good-girl strength and spirit
the inspiration for Bronte's Jane Eyre, a governess,
her passionate independence; educated, autonomous,
in revolt against the lot; id, locked in the attic.

Classic heroines, their lines censored, metaphor straitjacketed,
topsy-turvy corsets tight as Scarlet O'Hara's, but sadly, not so loose.

Later, on the streets of romantic fiction,
fantasy is real women at the centre of story,
still painting satire on the back of deep feeling.

Horse-drawn-slow, or slow, slow -  - quick-quick-slow,
down a winding road of flowers and hedgerow; hay,
soft lace, muslin, frills...watch the pace of rugged landscape,
there's a willful spirit emerge through the ages,
our indomitable, incorrigible, formidable woman
until she's full mettle throttle and a real warm heart.

See her fierce liberation on the pages of every day,
in the leaping of her zeitgeist on the squares,
on the curled lip canvas of walls, her words
are the cinematic graffiti of women's culture,
of fiery clouds calligraphic across blue skies.

(Jane Austen smiles. Another modern heroine writes the next page,
dipping the oceans, sitting in circles, weaving the texture of lives.)


07/08