Learning to write

 

Learning to write

 

The house is fully furnished:

A mother, three kids and the TV;

The father is upstairs, attached to a guitar:

An intricate arrangement of strings and chords;

An intimate arrangement of bodies and words.

 

My hobby, he once declaimed,

Is not playing the guitar,

It’s learning to play the guitar.

Then he took himself off for a session.

A terse man, pithy under the skin.

Once, maybe twice,

He’d handed me the guitar

Like a baton, like a lesson.

I never learned. He never listened.

 

And so, only when the music stopped,

Was the poem written.

 

Now, sometimes, if I listen very hard

I can still hear the fingers at work:

The tiny metallic flowers blooming,

Filling the air; dandelion heads

Going to seed, wind-blown.

 

The time is always the same: too late.

This poem was initially inspired by Carolyn Kizer's Thrall. See the link below.

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/thrall-2/

The original of the picture above is by Regina Cassolo Bracchi.

For information about her see the link below.

https://www.gamec.it/en/regina-della-scultura/

Family Therapy

 

Family Therapy

 

Tell me,

 

Were you ready for this?

Being asked to undress,

 

The tone polite but stern.

The folding of your clothes …

 

Was it tea or coffee

That you dunked the biscuit in?

 

I could, I suppose, agree

That when they asked who did it -

 

Who started the fight,

Who committed the theft -

 

That you looked up right,

Or that you looked up left.

 

Are you looking up now,

As if you’d know somehow?

Still

It’s in a shoebox under the bed - still

 

She’s young here

a stranger to me

the photo

its moment of happiness

excludes me

 

Young and happy

the picture captures this

imprisons and endlessly repeats it

still as Zeno’s Arrow

 

Yet no one remembers it

this deictic moment this little death

 

It lives only in the image

and what I now bring to it

yet still the wound

the piercing of the heart

 

It’s all there is and then it’s gone.

Solus

 

Solus

On the edge of everything there is something:

The mind, cradled by bone and skin,

Is the shore for an ocean’s wave -

With the kiss of kith and kin -

Rolling shadows into this island cave.

 

On the edge of everything there is nothing;

It hovers on the periphery of being,

But sometimes it slides into view

Like a fin slicing through water,

Cutting a hole in the whole … thing.

 

A whole is a whole by virtue of its parts;

A hole is hole by virtue of what surrounds it.

 

Everything but Nothing can be shared.

https://www.damienhirst.com/the-physical-impossibility-of

Offstage

 

Offstage

She’s backstage in wardrobe,

Being measured up:

The final touches to costume,

Hair and make-up.

She can hear muffled voices,

Layered on the silence:

The ruffled noises of actors and audience,

The occasional scratching of applause,

The sharpening of the critics’ claws.

 

She shuffles around the stage -

Her slippers scuffing the polished floor -

Rearranging the props,

Shifting the scenery,

Changing the backdrops.

 

She’s working on trying

To remember her lines,

And how to figure in her cues.

But she keeps forgetting,

Drifting off … is carried away …

 

Then, prompted,

She exits stage left,

Wanders down the abandoned corridor,

Past the glitzy Stations of the Cross

That line the walls,

Climbs the narrow, crepuscular

Staircase, gripping the twisting,

Muscular bannister,

Calmed and worn smooth

By familiar hands.

 

At the top, a door ajar;

She finds herself in the gods,

Looks around, takes a seat,

Takes a breath,

And stares down

Into the teeming, atomised dark,

Sits waiting for the next show to start.

The Slanting of the light

 

The Slanting of the Light

 

You left them sitting in a room,

Backstage, behind a closed door,

For years,

Waiting for it to open

And for you to come back in

Larger than life - spotlight, drum roll – ta-dah!

With an invitation to the reunion;

Or perhaps they were hoping

For something small:

For a supplicant’s tentative knock,

For something to rouse them

From the stupor of sour memory,

For some good reason to cross the floor,

To ask who’s there, to open the door,

To set the dust motes aflight,

To change the slanting of the light.

 

But no one ever knocked

And the light remained unbent,

Unbending.

And now the door is locked,

And the room is empty and unaired,

Filled with music - no one has ever heard -

To announce the happy ending.

An ocean

 

An ocean washes the shore of this island

 

The days roll in upon the beach,

Seethe and foam and then retreat

And the sand sucks in each one;

Footprints roam, fill and dissolve,

The years are erased and scrolled,

Experienced and then gone –

Scuttled or shipwrecked -

The water clogged with wrack;

Yet still the sirens sing along,

Whilst tides wreak havoc at your back.

 

Beyond the beach, the trees …

Out of reach … and on your knees.