Could I love you,
if I had no memory
of breathing skin,
of weight, or time, or matter?
(Close to counting
creases in the sheet
that covers way too much of you)
Perfect as the instinct
and the courage
of the painter’s first
and lasting stroke;
(Wide awake now,
caught by morning lust
and light, I watch)
silent as the forest,
in between the lightning
and the first few swollen drops
of [...]
Our cells are dying faster
than we breathe.
It takes less than a decade
to replace each bit of then
with bits of some time later.
We are impermanence personified
and yet we love stability.
We feel the moments we are in
to be the moulds that keep the past
and hold the future.
We dig up pots and arrow heads
and take each artefact,
each time-worn, [...]
A horse is a horse
the moment it’s born.
So are tulips, microbes, stones.
Only humans are not born
to what we may become;
we are not manifest or destined.
Each of us must run
a private, evolutionary course,
before we stop to be mere animated matter -
and some of us will never learn.
A horse is a horse
the moment it’s born;
its grace its [...]
“We open our eyes and stare at the coiling darkness,
And enter our dreams again.”
. (Conrad Aiken)
The wooden handrail on the stairs,
first used by your great-grandparents,
shines like a mirror that accepts
but won’t reflect the lives of
those who went before and those
who’ll be here after we are gone.
The portraits on the bedroom walls,
now solemnly dressed in yellows [...]
“Supper on a tray in the drawing-room
and nothing said.”
. (Selima Hill)
Another failed evening,
a dinner gone cold
over stale conversation
and on my way home now,
safe in the belly
of city and metro,
I think of the short time
we thought we could be
love’s fierce ambassadors -
and how we have ended,
apart but still bound
by dreams of if-only-yous.
At the back of a [...]
One should blare out the despised original version
. stuck in one’s heart:
“I love being alone!
. I love being alone!”
And then whisper the translation:
. a defenceless “Don’t go!”
. (Yevgeny Yevtushenko)
So, we’re walking a bit faster now
we’ve crossed Charles Bridge.
The streets on this side of the river are
almost free of tourists, cabs [...]
“The skeletons of a thousand butterflies
sleep in my enclosure.”
. (Federico García Lorca)
Fire thinks that Shadow dances
like a supplicant.
Fire doesn’t know that when its flames
have gone to sleep,
Shadow fills a sky,
draped with burning diamonds.
“You know, the moon is just a violin
that longs to be repaired.”
. (Rachel Manley)
I close my eyes and I see lightning
running down my veins and hear
the drums of thunder gather in my wrists.
The outside world is as small
as the hand that caresses your hair
and notes the soft fall and rise of your breasts.
I close my [...]
“I lift my hands to you. I kneel toward my heart. I have no other home.”
. (Leonard Cohen)
In Reims, I stood within the silence
of the gathering dusk,
inside the Notre Dame cathedral:
A speck of dust, forever caught
in fading bruises of soft light
that fell from Chagall’s
stained glass windows…
I watched the sky above the island
bleed in [...]
“And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.”
. (Ted Hughes)
Down by the river,
where we stopped
to greet the sleeping swans,
bats twinkle darkly,
on and off,
between the trees,
like hesitant and twisted
twins of stately blinking,
distant stars.
(I look at you.
You smile - and all
that I can think is,
Marry me.
My love,
please marry me:
My doubts, my fears
and all those years
I lived [...]
“Our tribe’s renewing faith and pride:
Love overgrows a rock as blood outbreeds it.”
. (Eric Roach)
This is the song
our fathers taught us.
These are the skin and bones
our mothers carried as a tune:
Raise your hand
and you can block the light
that has been travelling so far,
to come and join us.
They [...]
“Leave to dogs and the angels
the music that lies beyond hearing.”
. (Jane Hirshfield)
‘Stella by Starlight’
Chet Baker live in Tokyo.
So strange to listen here,
alone, to something
once recorded live, so
long ago and far away,
while I write to you,
and while I wait
for the kettle to boil,
and for my thoughts
to gather and to settle
on this page –
thinking of you
and [...]
“This haunted heart that doesn’t fit
My language or the clothes I wear”
. (Léon Laleau)
I’d never noticed the dark rust rattle
of our island bus. How alien also,
now we were leaving, its dark
metallic cough, the black tar smoke.
Before, it was the dusky smell of goats
and restless chickens, the raw
perfume of hand-rolled cigarettes,
the cloying scent of jack fruit [...]
“Those you planted as children, ah, those trees
are long since too heavy for you to bear.”
. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Softly, slowly leaking time:
Soft as rain – these
memories are soft as rain,
now falling on old statues
in a long abandoned park.
Here’s a general and there
a king of some old country
no-one really knows
what happened to.
Memories – of summer [...]
“Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
. (T.S. Eliot)
In love and worship the mundane
becomes possessed by symbol.
The fruits of wheat and vine
translate into the flesh and blood
of Saviours -
as this small bit of cloth you left
beside your plate,
stained with chicken juice
and traces of your lipstick,
now becomes a holy relic;
something held and touched by you,
by [...]
“I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
. (Pablo Neruda)
Is it a kindness that I still
can hear your voice;
your whispers drawing maps
our flesh must follow?
That I, eyes closed,
can see your fingers tightening,
your back now sharply rising
like a victory arch?
That I, so far away,
can smell the salty,
swollen, opening furnace
where my tongue must [...]
“God, or someone, had parted the sea, and who were we
to say we weren’t going to walk through it?”
. (Moniza Alvi)
I have no words for this:
The way we climbed this stack of stone -
how sun and shadow chased each other
and the old tar road that had carried us
from the city to your cottage and now [...]
“You go your way
I’ll go your way too”
. (Leonard Cohen)
I watch you take the scissors
to the browning ends of the leaves
on the old potted plant
that hangs from the ceiling.
You bring a perfect sense of concentration
to all the things you do:
From pouring out the tea
into your grandmother’s old cups,
to spreading honey on your toast
and [...]
“In the long willow branches, the dark cypress,
my own ghost hides, stares out at me,”
. (Moniza Alvi)
It’s a long fall,
in the darkness, leaking from
the time between each
ringing of the bells,
to where the eyes seek out
the worlds beyond the cracked map,
painted on the ceiling:
A long way back to you, my love.
“I have not become the heron,
leaving my body on the shore,”
. (Leonard Cohen)
The herbs are doing well,
on my small balcony.
It’s raining now,
after a week of sun,
when I had to water them,
each day.
I don’t know why I’m
writing this to you -
maybe I am homesick.
Maybe, like those herbs,
I long for rain.