Grey stones
under a grey Cotswold sky:
fading letters
summing up faded lives;
and the roofs
beyond the graveyard:
grey stone
under a grey Cotswold sky.
Category Archives: All poems
Cotswold Graveyard
Uisge
Miles of louring cloud
over the sodden peat
and huddling cottages.
Who’d live here but
the lichen and the crows?
Only the men who
keep this art alive:
to set the rain on fire.
Grizzly bears and other surprises
The massive grizzly
is feeding placidly
on crimson huckleberries.
We click away.
The sudden hot stink
of putrid breath –
the crunch of jaws
on cranial bone –
unthinkable.
This is a family holiday;
The grizzly is still feeding;
we click away.
The View
In a place of vast surpassing beauty
a man started building a path
to a view that was
just as fine as
any other
there.
Why is he doing it the locals asked
you can bet he’s going to
take money off some
foreign dupes
too stupid
by half.
And in time people came from afar
to climb that path to a view
that was just as fine
as any other
and just
as free
only
far steeper.
And so he grew
into a contented old man
happy in the surreptitious gift of
beauty he’d given the foreign dupes.
In the Still of the Night
I wake in the still of the night
and scribble a note in the dark.
I wake at dawn; in the half-light
puzzle over the hieroglyphs
whose meaning I cannot now
make out – and suddenly
catch a glimpse of my father’s life
at eighty-six,
half-waking
on his side of a half empty bed
to a semblance of light, a mockery
of consciousness,
lost in time, groping for things,
words, explanations,
anything to hold on to,
no matter how silly it sounds
to those who cannot understand
that figures on invoices
forever refuse
to add up, buttons on dishwashers
wander, and the phone
only connects you to strangers.
November Recipe
Take a pinch of autumn wood
a tablespoon of dew
an ounce of silver birchtree bark
a spiderweb or two.
Add the taste of morning mist
a crystal cloud of moss
the sodden smell of fallen leaves
one sadness, half a loss.
Blend with a rustling underfoot
a blackbird’s yellow bill
the browns of pinecones on the ground
the distant grey of hills.
Warm with that ray of sinking sun
stir with the twilight breeze –
and drink before the thrush’s song
fades from the winter trees.
Yellowstone
After the geysers come the restless nights.
I’m my own Yellowstone: as sulphur mists
dissolve the rim of consciousness
my superheated soul spouts similes,
mixed metaphors thud from the mudpool
of my bubbling brain, hissing hyperboles
ricochet off the walls of lodgepole pine;
from underneath the floorboards fumaroles
steam acid vapour. The silver lining
to these endless nights: sleeplessness
crystallized in syllables; the scalloped edge
around the hotspring of my seething mind.
Transcendence in the RV Park
In the cool
after-dawn quiet
outside the becalmed
450-hp, 10-cylinder, 30-foot behemoth
dwarfed by two thousand years of redwood tree
paring my fingernails feels an uplifting, almost
spiritual experience. You have to wonder
what’s wrong with us
humans – or
right.
Burqa
They say it’s about dignity.
A throwback to the dark ages,
denying four centuries of civilisation.
Their newspapers write about
human rights, and that faith, though
sacred, must learn to compromise.
They talk of enslavement:
it strips us of all individuality and
reduces us to chattels, they say.
Look, they whisper, there goes one.
I can’t think how they can submit
to such humiliation.
It frightens their children, they say,
and there’s something sinister
in not daring to meet face to face.
I walk their streets, safe
in my black oubliette. Thick cloth
softens whispers; the grille
in front of my eyes shuts out
their exposed flesh, shameless
behaviour, brash looks. Yes,
I have wondered what it’d be like
to feel free. But I tell myself,
Better the devil you know.
Collioure
late morning stroll to the boulangerie
baguette and coffee and
the badly written crime novel
about la France profonde
where the bestial slaughter
of a beur hardly disturbs the idyll
gelatinous time
just now and then the whistle of trains
behind the bougainvilleas on fire
on the beach the babel of Europe on holiday
silhouette of a windmill
above gnarled vines
red soil of foothills
walls washed in Southern pastels
clink of ice cubes
impossibly green diabolo menthe
watch the summer melt
in the dark the fan spins
in the windowless bedroom
telling lies of a wide open sea
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