Light notes
a calling card,
lingers in the crevices,
the gaps, this after-song
to water, hope lifted.
white wisps drift, blow freely,
write words out of captivity
in a burst lasting seconds,
brush the sun into distance.
sculpted, zip-suited white,
wings tightly in, grey pants,
keen eye. He is your lookout,
can play the peacock for hours.
patient on the horizon, a note,
a promise that can’t be touched.
Night yearns, locked, drowned out
by this incandescent rain.
Drift
as wood, motionless,
emotion full, tidal strength.
an escape into the body
peeled off, layer by layer.
here is flow.
where there is light,
silver magic weave.
enravelled, unravelled,
one motion.
Kicking the can
staple them together, immobile bodies,
built thus high so they cannot fall.
You can’t pass either. Clearly, No Entry.
the self-created, the unwitnessed,
those generated by the masses, disgorged.
We plan a life in man-made widgets.
Globules of pop drip, accumulate,
and you wonder why you opened it.
Was it to drink or to learn something?
a sustenance for our woes, to bathe them?
The secret ingredient used to be cocaine,
some say. Did you get it on prescription?
shut it away from all these prying faces.
They don’t want it to escape, to wander,
in case someone shows what it really is.
.
All these heartfelt promises, they fade away,
and so they hide the light in brackets.
They may even dig a hole and sink it,
shun completely, so it can never breathe.
One day.
The dappled horse (a blues poem)
stares straight ahead, legs in the mud so deep, so quietly
still.
He raises neither head nor tail, a dappled statue on
the hill.
ivy framing the two fellows, finding gaps in the foliage,
they neither bother nor notice the solitary fellow on
edge.
When the children come calling, he feels them deep in his
bones,
forgets the time in the shivering snow when no one
heard his groans.
He never went beyond that farm, shackled as he was to that
tree.
When the Old Man died, he took a while to realise he
was free.
just because he doesn’t have to stand in this spot in
this open field,
but this is where he chooses to stand, deep in the
mud, now he’s wild.
For Leland
listen to the murmurations of a lost few
spiralling high in this languid, shivering air,
the cirrus strewn like white cotton sheets.
rousing life out of night, our shadows lengthening,
teasing us that they know the way. But only we know.
This is where nature absorbs us, draws us in.
a skill I can only dream of. An emerald lizard darts.
You ferret deep into the spiky undergrowth,
digging down this dry desert, coming up twigs.
hiking past our guards, these purple-blue mountains,
jagged peaks fogged out, streams of misted white light,
and without a care we pass by the ghosts of yesterday.
Our paths never cross with any other human being.
This is a kind of freedom, this sweet eclipsing
of the glass-brick-grey city with its petrol choke,
we walk as one, legs bumping legs bumping legs,
our breath blowing clouds to mix in the air,
as if we are a doodled, made-up faery creature.
as if seeking to reach down to bathe our heads.
Absent, we traipse this stone-worn curl of path,
knowing by heart its myriad twisted ways.
as though you are the parent and I am the child,
protecting me. You wag your tail and turn your head,
beckon me to follow as far as we can see.
The garden
‘Finding Trewyn Studio was a sort of magic. Here was a studio, a yard and garden where I could work in open air and space’ – Barbara Hepworth
‘A sort of magic’ is unearthed,
here, in this space, this embryonic bed,
a studio of colour birthed in energy,
art that explodes in wild, myriad furore.
a bold green of ever blue, speak of the intangible,
will it to form in our hands what only we can feel.
Carvations of sleek limbs and solid blocks.
parallel eyes juxtaposed, poised opposite.
One peers out, the other examines within.
The wider seems to fix us in irony.
We step out in order to step in,
reside inside the outside of ourselves,
where we are as we never were.
and here we are, deepest inside, turned.
Our reflections blossom within these other eyes,
big, bold expressions we have only yearned.
scooping out holes to show what is not there,
shaping the invisible, holding it in awe.
These ever-opening chasms seek order,
and escapes to become something new.
Redrawn, we attempt to paper the gaps,
the pits, the flaws, the empty sides.
formed out of cold stone, yet malleable,
exuding warmth, reinventing a sub-time,
our walls disappearing in shared energy.
bury our feet, so verdant, into the dirt,
absorbing Mother Earth into us,
and inside us she opens up her heart.
our worn hides, from time external,
all the losses, the weathered storms.
It offers this distilled, knowing glow,
bestowed in love, reinvention and peace.
And ‘a sort of magic’ brings us out.
