Dismay is waiting behind the door,where across the floor, footprints like hieroglyphschronicle the history of past defeats.Dead clothes, the skin of our former selves,still tumble from broken cases, cratessplit their sides with the books, a three-legged chair,bewildered, leans in the corner where a viper’s nestof jerseys entwines a broken lamp –all the high spume and […]
The moths came with a soft flutter one night and burrowed intothe deepest recesses of cloth. Their offspring had their fill, gnawedthe wool and cashmere mix of a coatframed by a hanger, shaped like you. They punched out holes, some like starswhich didn’t shine, coalesced into craters.Silver dust littered the wardrobe carpet. They were driven […]
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Handbound volume
Handbound volume
The Old Year’s gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night
August 1934 There’s a thin rain of music comes across the poppied corn, Across the poppied corn and the sun-splashed sea,Crying, ‘Who’s a-going venturing, a-venturing, a-venturing, Who’s a-going venturing with all a man can be?’O, listen, listen, listen, for it’s far, far away, The dim remembered country where the ghostly pipers blow,Across […]
Things seen and done add to memory,
are shuffled like cards in a pack,
come to the top in ways we can’t determine.
Remember this then: that here we stand,
together, once and fifty times, and this remains.
Daytime an’ nicht,
Sun, wind an’ rain;
The lang, cauld licht
O’ the spring months again.
Never written a poem for yourself
/ have you, you daft old bugger? Well
/ here goes.
/
/ …
On that sinuous passage from infancy
/ and youth’s buoyancy through middle
/ life to advanced years, the one certainty
/ is a…
It wakes when I wake, walks
/ when I walk, turns back when I
/ turn back, beating me to the door.
/
/ It spoils my…
