2 New Poems

Wildberry Bush

The cotton dresses of village girls hung
a dusty, sallow frame from clothesline cling
to despairing pittance,

like berry buds struggling up against
dry earth, wiry, plastic cable-like
and, still, not even sparking.

Put for two and two, place settings
harmonious as singing choir stockade
upon river mud-rock seats.

I grab tender handfuls, being of
silent tumult, too crass was a
spoken verse, then

as now, never to taste the
leather-ride hide of grown worlds
only sweetly sublime in its infant’s patter.

Smoker’s Cough

I light up, snuff out, candlebox,
wax burning down both ends of it,
for the finger-running freedom of
what it is to wait for minute-days
at Pancras crooked station staircase,

swell of wrought summer iron,
bar gates construction, post-war tile.

When we met, my skin was
cigarette cellophane, giving thin
cover to toxicity, rapping brush
of shore wave carrying crescent moon tide;

I could have washed the old person away.

But you saw through, past the packet
street litter in August rain,
to be so clutching, unadorned
washing out each other’s colours

to bleached brown PoMo
in train car light.