Bematist

 

Bematist   

 

Sisyphus calculating counting

pacing taking the measure of

the world from Alexandria

to the here and now sees

the shadow reducing

along the curvature

of the earth only

then to light up

the darkness

a moment

of water

caught

a well

slick

and

an

I

1

reflected on a shimmering surface   staring back   gone

Sisyphus

Eratosthenes

Bematist

bedtime story

 

bedtime story

 

the softness of summer light

late afternoon early evening

the way it adheres to solid surfaces

the way it emanates from leaf and tree

the way it washes across the grass

the way it gathers in the air

the way it breathes like music

and if you listen

the way it tells your story

using only the present tense

gilding the moment …

 

then the way twilight turns to dusk

turns to darkness incomplete

turns to starlight distance crossed

 

and so to sleep

Prognosis

 

Prognosis

 

The doctor shook his head,

The horizon’s coming after her,

He said.  He said,

It’s going to tip her off this world -

Which, after all, is flat, linear

When unfurled -

And take a part of your world too.

Did you imagine that the Coriolis

Effect was a fictitious force?

Or that Achilles would never catch up

With the tortoise?

That life was travelled along a Möbius strip?

 

The TV’s on all day, playing repeats,

A mockery of time passing.

She sits,

A bundle of sticks thrown at her feet,

Too many to count, too few not to number.

 

How much courage do you have to muster,

Waiting, knowing, looking over your shoulder?

A moment

 

A moment

 

The wind has dropped, coming in over the lake;

The storm, with its wild unrest, has moved on,

So now the ripples barely reach the shore:

The muscle of water relaxed; cloud borne away.

And the light lingers now, is altered and slow,

More smoulder than burn, as if the lifted lid

Of sky were hesitant to be lowered -

The moment is time, gathered and stored -

Only, finally, to slip from your fingers,

To slide shut on the darkness.

 

On the far side, away from the house,

The trees are gathering in the shadows

To separate black from blackness.

And soon the moon at your back will slink

Quietly into the water, quivering

Just below the surface, like a thought,

And you won’t turn to stare it in the face

But simply watch how it dances - elusive and alone,

Amorphous, trying to keep afloat -

Only, finally, to feel it sink like a stone. 

Borrowed Light

Borrowed light

It’ll be dark soon and time to go.

Could you pass the dice,

I’d like another throw?

Oh, I understand.  Club rules:

Just the once, never twice.

Yes, you’ve got to be kind to be cruel.

Well, a present, long in the unwrapping

And the children like animals,

Not knowing then warping,

Bending with the truth of it;

The knowledge of an unsteady sentinel

Watching over an illness that is implicit,

With happiness a symptom that reckons a cost:

All too brief a candle,

All too much found then lost,

But a gift all the same;

One we bestow, simply, as a mantle

For the igniting and sheltering of our flame;

As if the heat carried a living debt,

Paid tomorrow so to honour us;

For what shines is a currency yet.

The moon has risen, the darkness at its back -

Its mountains shadows, its deserts dust,

With somewhere on its conquered land a flag.

And the moon, oh why is it so cold, so bright?

Such a false god robed in borrowed light.

A poem on Loss and Grief

Grief

His palette holds mostly black now,

With shades of grey

On the periphery;

The taste of dust in his mouth.

He sits quietly before a canvas

Bereft of colour,

It’s whiteness sour.

His eyes are marked with ash.

His memory silently denies him;

Belief peters out.

The candle gutters;

She was his blue red yellow flame.

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A poem for The Dead

Sorrows

He weighed six stone -

The size of my daughter, aged ten -

The skin baggy on the bone,

The meat of him gone.

Death reduces, like a good sauce.

A scrawny thing, a corpse -

Carries no weight, no remorse,

No apology, no applause.

And memory, eaten at by worms,

Claws at skeletons, at the marrow;

And grief struggles to find a form,

Scraping and picking and gnawing

At sorrows.

Dark Atlas, poem

Dark Atlas

A map’s been nailed to the four corners of a round table.

There’s a key; there’s a scale; there are symbols:

Figures in a landscape, a path to follow;

Birds taking flight: an eagle, a swallow.

There is a route marked in red -

A river like an artery that has bled

Over mountain and forest to the ocean

Of our unknowing: a feeling, a prehension.

And somewhere in the dark atlas of the mind

Is the conceit in the relief of a journey that is signed.

The self and the other, a poem

In the last poem, Imago, there was the idea of a second self, a pure self - an alter ego, a possibility awaiting realisation: the voice in our head that speaks to us of us.
It is a fiction, of course - the story of us that we tell ourselves - an apocrypha, a shadow on the wall of our cave.

Second Coming

He was a long time coming,

A hard time we had of it:

Climbing the mountain took his childhood,

The summit never in view, always over

The next rise; the deferral of arrival.

Swimming the ocean found him struggling

To keep his head clear of the waves

That rolled over him, yet pushed

Him forward while the undertow

Pulled at his tired, aching limbs,

Leaving him washed up on the shore

Of middle-age.

The desert crossing was death:

The scenery unchanging and endless;

The heat dried him out,

The thirst was memory –

Unquenchable and imprecise.

And at night the chill broke his bones;

The swallowed sun shattered to a myriad stars,

Each one a candle his breath couldn’t reach,

A thousand birthday wishes he could no longer make.

Yet finally they went out, not of a sudden,

But one by one by one by one …

The darkness reaching back,

Stretching ahead.

He had always been a long way off,

Too far back to catch up,

And I’d lose sight of him,

For years … out of mind.

Then I’d see him, distant and dim,

Dwarfed by the mountain,

Or bobbing like a cork;

Swimming in the heat haze,

Or shimmering with the cold.

Then, finally, not quite erased,

He’d disappear again,

And I’d wonder if he’d’ve recognised me,

Or I him; We’d travelled so far.

The day he passed me by,

I was certain it was him,

But I couldn’t call out.

How sure his step was;

How I envied his glide, his grace.

How could I have doubted him?

Why should he not leave me behind?

Stepping over the divided line.

The world, after all, was his:

The mountains, the seas, the deserts.

There is darkness in the jungle.

God will not tread here:

The trees do not believe,

And the fruit ripens in the mouth.

I lift my snout from the muddied puddle,

Sniff the air, and scenting danger,

Scuttle back to my burrow.

 

There was so much to say,

And yet when I found him

Shivering in my dimly-lit cave,

Flickering like a candle flame,

Our shadows made monstrous

On the damp walls,

Our breath mixed and condensing,

The light simply went out.

We were extinguished, Plato.

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