old night

Oh the long-drawn, horrid night

The stars that taunt, the songs that haunt

All dreams throughout this visage blighted

Wronged and yet, so sweetly righted

Oh the soul-less, chaste to-do

Of comings plain and goings vain

In black-stacked coaches plunging through

The oak and beetled, barkled yew

Oh the monstrous calm that clings

With fingers chill upon my sill

And lingers in the frettish formings,

The lost old bones of many mornings

Crackled on the clew

in and up

A little further
we go
in and up
deeper and higher
the rushing and the whisping and the noises that used to terrify
when we were children

shadows are growing things,
unfolding on a crocheted spring morning
after heathcliff went away,
when all the days were open linen stretched
musical and brazen
in their possibility

a little sadder we get,
understanding the roots and the soil
pulling our muscles taut
while hyacinth and lilies, summer bliss, are torn up by the much-prayed for rain

the nuts and the charcoal burrow
and we are brighter
further out and further on
woven with plastic shreds of another people's genius
the realities that used to puzzle us
when we were children

magic circle

I stepped outside the circle

stepped beyond the wall

out of the light

and into the morning

I strayed a little too far

in my wondering

passed the garden wall

all covered in ivy and bracken

Beyond help, beyond all

I ever counted precious

the landscape changes

and I am wicked

with delight

sinfully drowning in an open moor

i am

I am

That dazzling void

That trumpeting call

That passionate need

Of weeded, thimble colors bright

Coursing through alcohol and blurred sight

I am

Everything you can’t fight, or don’t want to.

I am

That pristine dream

That boyhood fort

That summer secret

Of too-young transport lost

Meddling with branchless exhaust

I am

The old ache at last wearing through.

I am

That magnificent noise

That anachronous pull

That proliferous bent

That beats like forty wings

Alighting on destiny’s spring

I am

The old coming gin sling, that had to end.

firstish

Blue wall,

cracked enamel porcelain blue

like the absence of you

a twittered Madame’s darkling hue

and inlet tides

I can’t swim through

Little though we see, much we seem to know

Of silted muddy flats, fresh covered by the snow

And soulish beauty patched deep for the fallow

Sweet remains of what can’t grow

Riddled in the blue,

The salted, pining milk-fresh white

Of winter like rags in the rape of night

Of silence like shrapnel in the mouth of night

From a drowned-almond height

Wicker bare box,

Empty on the view

Snapped, packed, winterly you

Thyme on the ridging slew

Of a blue wall