Saturday, 17 August 2013

NO THROUGH ROAD

Dying lasts – but living does not last.
The journey’s destination is soon clear
in the skin’s thinning and the greyed-out hair.
If we knew when we embarked
how quickly it would all be past –
would we set out? Death lasts,
but living does not last.

Dying is not a shadow, not a crow
circling, doesn’t stand in doorways
hooded and scythed. Its messages
are filled in against your name, like this,
and handed to you when you get your bones.
The waning powers, the sagging breasts suggest
death lasts, but living does not last.

Death abides elsewhere, an untold land -
yet every word that country speaks
is rooted in us as a royal command.
Death comes to us with empty hands,
and says: 'It is time for us to go.
Your years and days and hours are all gone past.
May you last longer than mere dying lasts'.



Monday, 18 March 2013

THE BUTTERFLY MAN

once you drove me to the train station,
but the car fell in a ditch, on the way.
it had to be hauled out by a tractor.
i don't know why you swerved,
but then - what butterfly flies straight?

i could always make out
the invisible scallop shell, the staff -
but it's your giggle i remember best.
you laughed, perhaps, because
as soon as truth stood to attention,
you were waiting for the pratfall?

i remember you doing
an enormous jigsaw:
butterflies in a thousand pieces!
those messenger-companions
who taught you every hither and thither turn
of the air-labyrinth.  a fine, erratic art.

your kindness saw me through many
tempests.  a Prospero yourself,
you were no stranger to self-sown whirlwinds.
i sent you poems: scorched birds
who'd come through the fire, and
generously you replied,
singling out phrases which pleased you -
giving me something back.

that's what you did well: you gave back...
and now the measure of that giving
is that this path is all done.
it's time to try out the air beyond the edge,
open your dappled wings and float.

"Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyager!"


(for Stanley, who died on 17th March 2013)




Tuesday, 19 February 2013

MORNING MIST


beyond its milky rim the field is dissolved.
a woodpecker's muffled yaffle
protests the silence which beads trunks and twigs.

this mute envelope
is winter's most delicate caress:
it makes everything into an absence.

it drains the colour, heft and tussle
of world: it denies world, world is not,
world was a failing work it has painted out.

a water-colourist
could not better its subtle splay of tones,
nor a poet be as deft at getting lost.