Poetry: songs of myself
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Parallel Lines
Rain falls on Saltaire.
Mist sinks down the wooded hill, slinks down red-brick streets. On the platform, we eat chips soaked in vinegar and salt. There is a terseness that exists with you and me. We have gone too far for word or gesture or touch to bridge the broadening gap. Trains pass us, roaring on to make their connections. None are stopping here. There are no connections here: Just these two parallel lines. --.04.2003 |
The Cog
The thrum of tractors -
my mechanical dawn chorus - coaxes me to consciousness. By the closed window, a fly buzzes in the heat. I think of yesterday: I said those things, in that way, because I knew they would hurt. Meticulously, my words were calculated. The familial engine has evolved beyond this little glitch. Some- -thing vital fails to turn. Some- -thing chokes. I am all adrift. 03.09.2004 |
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Unquantifiable
The Underwood sits
patiently on my floorboards. I watch as you undo its delicate logic with gentle, careful fingers. I am content to observe as you explore its dusty mechanism - its rows of cogs, springs, wheels absorb you as much as I can. Silent, it does not mind your sensitive probings. I wonder if its makers could have foretold this calm deconstruction. Take care, though. There is no such methodology to love. It is unwilling to be quantified. Leave it to its mystery. 20.10.04 |
A Mystery of Salt
Spray soaring, searing
like comet ice, the boat shears swift through medusal constellations, coronae purple-fringed and fluttering. Luminous in the blue, drifting by slow degrees through clouds of knotted weed; adrift, undulating in the vast abyssal main. In that depth of green, I could see you swoop amid silver slips of fish. Stiff-winged like that fulmar, but reduced by the weight of waves. You are made distant by the trickery of light and deepest water, by the fathomless saline cosmology of this space. And yet, observing from this dry and stony shore, I realise I should not try to understand this underwater system - It is your own mystery of salt. 20.08.05 |