Poems

Taut as a drum, let the sea slip round us
as it slips round continents,
as it slips, obliquely, into a poem
(when I really don't mean it to),
as it slips on like a dress,
and off like one too
when it, yes it, is done
with you.

The grey sky hung like a flannelette sheet.
Frayed a bit with yellow light, the centre traps
the muggy air. The sea will wet the hems of it.

I think my Nan has tucked it there.
Anxious in December that we might catch chill,
she snuck in with the moon as we slept.

Loping like a ghost along the moon-slick pavement,
the white dog is trotting on beside the gutter full
of moon-beams and blossom and delicate
orbs that are the images of skulls of mannequin
all leering like corpses from the sex-shop-front.

The border of the sky is torn
to lilac-gold. Between the sun
and streetlight dips a sudden gust
of melancholy, fogging rain.
Inviting like a lockless door
the night to bring her shadow in.

You always-walking waves of men
whose footsteps sound our stony deep,
step lightly now above our heads
or else you may disturb our sleep.

Doubloons, fat pennants loll
and lay about on greeny fog,
and each twig tilts their shield-shades,
each rough-cut leaf, to interrupt
the broad blue back above.

Rain spoiled the fruit, they clot the nets –
these oblivious, night-black plums – dropped off
to bloom white mould, and shrink, and curdle
like so much pelagic mass hauled up
to dry in the drag-net off Nantucket or

Here, between the trunks in cemetery rows –
where glass-eyed flies once clung to fruit, 
and burst like dandelion heads as we passed
above the matted undulations of the grass
shot through with rusty pickets – jutting up

Like galleon bones, half sunk in silt  
and scoured pips – mis-sown by time to bare 
the porous ridges where their flesh hooked on
much as it does in us, still straining dark
and silent as a dragline in the empty sea, 

Or the grass that snarling wrecks the wall 
where a fig switch sits – snapped at the brittle joint, 
and a trough inclines the rain, whose skin of light
crosscut by fine black furrows of shade
is like the scale-wrapped flank of a fish.

I realise I am sweeping your grave, when – 
somewhere, a magpie sings, and I look up
through the naked lattice of the plum
and I see the sky is white, with one red edge,
like a segment from a peach.

The cattail bending,
hidden in the autumn wind.
A silent blackbird

The sky turns with crumpled leaves,
a flock of sparrows - tumbling.

The tap tap tap tap
of drips on my head. Is God
delayed? Impatient?

This frog in my hand
is round as a pond. It jumps
onto dirt. A thud.

Ink drips into ink.
Starling skating black and green
across the river.