On a train between one place and another.
Daffodils on the embankment.
Lambs in a dappled field.
You doze for a minute.
A jolt. You wake up.
The train’s stopped at one place or another.
Bare branches etched on a grey sky.
Winter on the air.
Category Archives: Moments
The train ride
Walking home
Crossing the cemetery
I am the first to imprint
my presence step by step
on the early snow.
Around me not a sound.
Only those are here
who will not walk again.
And look: the solitary track
of a small night creature
across my path.
The blender
Our broken blender,
stainless steel and spotless glass,
kept its pride of place
on the black marble countertop
for a full decade –
a household deity, sadly defunct.
So one day I decide
to take it to where superannuated
blenders go – but
in a gesture of not quite farewell
I plug it in and
turn the knob one final time.
A shudder, a shake,
a rattle, a rumble: a resurrection
right here in the kitchen.
And the blender, reinstated, sits
in its corner,
a serene benevolent buddha
surveying our comings
and goings as we near our own
fatal malfunction,
and from time to time rouses
itself, roars into life,
regales us with a raspberry shake
and a message:
You may feel faulty or rusty,
a reject –
but hey, why not give it
one last whirl
before someone pulls the plug.
(The line in a gesture of not quite farewell
was lifted from Robert Rehder’s On the
Nature of Physical Law)
The line “in a gesture of not quite farewell”
was lifted from Robert Rehder’s
On the Nature of Physical Law
Durschlegi, Amden
Takes only ten minutes
of laboured breath
to reach that point.
A practised hand
with a casual flick
of the wrist unrolls
the carpet of long lake,
wide pastures, houses,
the high mountains.
Rest a moment.
Take it in –
and tackle the descent
while the hand,
unseen, rolls it all up
for safekeeping.
Earth Rising
It rolls up like a marble
over the grey wasteland of the moon.
And Frank Borman, commander of Apollo 8,
first man in outer space, the man who says
that no, he didn’t tell his family what it was like
up there when he came back, he was too busy
catching up on the nitty-gritties of family life;
the astronaut who says that weightlessness
is boring, and puking in outer space the same
it is at home: uncomfortable; the space hero
who’s never seen and can’t recall the title
of Space Odyssey; who says the Star Trek motto
To boldly go where no man’s gone before
does nothing for him – the most prosaic man
to leave the soil of this blue planet says:
Hand me a roll of color quick, would you?
A beautiful blue marble, swirls of ochre and white,
it rolls up over the grey wasteland of the moon.
We wake up on it every morning.
Somebody hand me a roll of colour. Quick.
Carrying Jack
I lift you up gently –
look, this is how we do it –
into the cradle of my arms.
I feel your solid weight,
breathe in your smell
of old dog asleep.
I carry you down
into the garden and
set you down softly
as I used to
for so many days
when you were alive
and let you go.
Map reading at 60
Should I feel lost these days
I will unfold my trusty Ordnance Survey map –
brittle from many a soaking, sunshine, sweat;
and though it is coming apart at the creases,
and yellowish areas of terra incognita
are spreading out from frayed edges,
when I take off my glasses to peer
at the whorls, dots, cabbalistic symbols,
I think I can make out where I’m at – look:
miles north of this place called Despondency,
and – except for a ravine and some ridges –
not far, not so far south of Contentment at all.
My Covid-19 Song
so somewhere in China
a new kind of virus breeds
they say bats are involved
and open markets and now
it spreads and breeds
new verbs so now we’re
social distancing
with the best of them
and all out of face masks
and the shelves empty of bog rolls
surely someone somewhere
must be sitting on millions of them
taking a gleeful crap
in the lap of luxury
the selfish asshole
and in the twilight
you walk the dog
the blinds are down and
the shutters closed
everywhere
provoking medieval visions
how they’re all lying dead
behind those blind windows but
the day was absurdly clear and bright
and there’s a golden moon in the sky
and one golden star
all alone
Jack at sixteen
Sometimes
he just stands there.
Just stands,
back hunched,
head drooping,
milky eyes unfocused.
Sans eyes,
sans teeth –
sans everything?
Whether he’s lost,
unseeing,
wondering where he’s at;
or whether
he’s following a fox
into the undergrowth
while you, helpless,
call his name
until he bursts from bushes
happy:
that he cannot tell you.
That is for you to decide.
New Year’s Day
Time to take the dog out
into pale sun.
Pleasant enough walking,
until we reach
the dark curtain of fir trees
where the path,
rising, turns to ice.
As if on cue the noon bell rings:
time to turn back.
After all, we’re no spring chickens;
after all,
we’ve been to that top before,
know that view;
why bother? After all, it’s only
the first day of a whole new year.
So we go on.
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