Moon Cycles
Often, in silent times, I think
of trees and death, and how
they are the same:
Circular, replenished, endless,
taking, growing in kind,
Set between plastic places
that echo art that tastes
of bitter ash, bootleg cigarettes,
Back to the spring from which
all things flow.
I think, “why the Garden,
why plants, rocks, sunlight, rain,
why things so small hold joys?”
They are circles,
reminders of home.
Embers
I was a great collaborator with
wartime cigarettes, an artist
with the conical scream-sighs
of life under bombardment.
I trust you more under
a broken street lamp, under
a shattered sky space,
where time stills
Than I ever did at dinner
tables pushed together on
sidewalks where some grand
conspiracy was hatched beneath
Breath you took in so
easily, not as now with
cracked plaster, mulched brick,
petroleum haze.
A Note for Fathers
You dwell in memory:
blazing, soot-smoke, refined flame,
shifting, yet stone-hard,
with weights unbound.
There are scarce words
I would have written,
amongst polish concrete monuments,
amongst pine-willow shade,
had I the blood that now courses,
breath that now fills,
webs of infinite electric complexity
that pour themselves onto paper,
now.
Then I was bereft of all,
shivering for the slight,
tender touch of idle hands,
offering frozen comfort,
knowing some other truth.
In the chisel marks,
you persist
doing now no damage,
knowing now no strife,
knowing not how
grass, water, time,
can move boulders –
do not dull wounds.
A Long-Ago Castle
There was a vanished treaty
between us, an unfinished thing
in pieces of air,
in words of departure.
A promise across waters,
in amber remembered,
that I held bright, praying
for broken bells to ring.
Your signature, after I took
the hill, bloody and wracked,
dripped from lips with
wounded tone, but I
took it sincere, in a lampshade
way beneath the din of
the Turkish restaurant ,
beneath the pale light of
London black cabs.
Mine, as I stare now into
infinite regress of couch fabric
patterns, brutalist math
of spreadsheets, time punch cards,
Was holding something back
some patterned longing
with no words to name:
This would only be memories,
written on the parchment of
windbreaks and stream lines.
A Time in Spring
I heard the Cranberries in the back
of the Yogyakarta taxi:
Transmissions from other times,
lingering like window lights
on the dusty street,
warm glow of iftar dinners,
That rushed past as we
sang into the humid night,
Irish troubles bleeding
into a symphony of
Motorcycle signals,
street vendor shouts,
Warung announcers pushing
unfiltered cigarettes, on passing
Tourist crowds.
Riding the 55 Bus in Mid-Afternoon
These days, I live
in ruins of greater things,
stray thoughts of greater minds,
last embers of roaring effigies.
I can hardly imagine a shaping
of steel for shelter
A shaping of brick for walls,
asphalt for roads, bridges.
Where did the hands come from?
Were they as simple as mine?
Lucky Ones
We hashed out
life over
quarter-beers in the Hamburg bars,
over the foosball din and
the tap of shoe soles on pavement.
We knew how all
things would go,
from the patterns of planets to
the flutter of sparrow winds,
how all of it was one circle,
Ourselves at
the centre;
Two wet-soaking
amateurs,
their backs bruised from
pressing against invisible walls
So tight for
warmth we
never flew, beyond the hazed
windows, weeping for the fires
That burned
across the alley corner.
