Thursday 1 December 2011

What is nice / To the distant shore

What is nice

I took the wood off the compost heap.
It was too big so I cut it up with the good saw.

It was wet,
some bits frozen a few
rings in

So I split some of the smaller bits and
laid them on the hot coals, glowing orange
and translucent

so that they would burn and
the bigger logs could dry on top.

With the waiting logs I made a pile,
watched them whistle and spit, snap

like home,
where my hair and my
skin smell of smoke.

He had drunk too much to walk straight.

It doesn’t matter
all his life he has walked me straight.

The axe sparked where it hit the stone ground.
What is nice is when you don’t have to understand. 


Winter 2010




To the distant shore

To the distant shore there was a light flooding it came on ships with bright green sails
I saw you up in the mountains where the wild pigs snuffle and
ruck up the dawn’s damp mud
and the streams swell with rain water
I had been in those places before
they swum up like slow grey fish from the back of my brain, rippling the surface so gently I
could barely tell, but could see the colour ring out like a drunk radio wave
It flickered my eyelid
To see the clouds shadows on the scrub mountains
To see the shafts that break through them, and mirror the emeralds in the grass.
The smoke from those houses dwindled upwards from the bottom of the valley to the top,
fingers raised to the sky, which raised back, shrugged off by the mountains like a scarf, so
that there was a gap between them, which gave the mountains a dark glow,
thudding like a headache on the skyline.

I was in the oven of the earth, trembling as a plague for lack of sleep

I can see the lines they are sediment on a hill's side
They are the hillside, millions of years
"this one is the dream of the rocks” 
Teach me the times I have missed 
staggering through blank faces and screwed tight nighttimes, desperate with silence

One day I will make you a thing it will bring tears to the eyes of the world and swell like a tumour in the brain of time.

It was an old country, the roads wouldn’t take you anywhere
no matter how many times you tried
they just led round in smaller and wider loops.

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