Safe mode

Promised to myself to blog more. Must keep promises. But I'm sitting in my office looking out at a furry grey sky, realising that in my exhausted state the chance of me coming up with something pithy or interesting is nil. When in doubt, post poems! Old poems! Poems that are so old, they're no longer scary to read.

Mine

the aim is fine tune gradual
the peace of heavy rain is owned
blinked to set resuscitation of vision
flashes of brilliance distant, maybe recede

he is carrying dust, and his certainty was
no-one wished themselves to accompany him
dismissing the ground as level, discussing
its ease of use. No, we will not hurt.

The ground will fade into beauty as easily
and the hasp of the air with lead
as the figure of one who is carried by another
sand blowing through the wide, broken streets

where frames are weak near the ocean
warm grey air slides up the riverine edge
condensing on the grains, making them cohere
the figures persevere as differences in structure emerge

distortions in vision induced by the sun
we could call them mirages rather than justifiable
blunders of suspense. Now the figure is moving
and we deduce his plan from our own; under stands of palm

the rattle of darkness held in pandanus rags
hardly seems possible this pool here, brilliant calm
is walking towards it, as if every imagined harm
discarded the tiny surface tension of chlorinated

warm blue and left it alone, the weakest thing
peeling from the surface in long chains by the sun
plotting the destruction of some moment & time
movement, or its creation, the same

witnessing the arc of evaporative calm
watching the sand, the witless climb
the moving pool, the waterfall of glass
sun below fire, the returning man


Jack

where diviners are hauling water is a bump of turf
and a cloud caul low over old heather scurf, sleep.
Dodder wrapt and a mimic fit to klepe greenshank
cotton blowing eastward, a match-mime set in as ore
shoulders sunk, heavy as rain and thistlewool merlin
blinking at the roll of weather. New roles settle, ticking
gently at the yaw singing out an arc overland

a whisper of suspicious music like the stars are dead
and the real fact of succession is dripped over rock in a sincere bid
to stay. But there is no stay. There is ice at the steady damage
patterned ground and small burrows where air laps and falls
an emergency environment at the instant where the jack comes
parabellum of delicacy and mores

violent spoils as manuscript through drier air
manifest as movement

the video slips & marshalled antics fade



MIR

A fragment of paint, a carrying bolt
DERA had missed & the threat of rain
so prolonged that the dictation of miracles
was abandoned. These simplicities were useless to me.
though war was all there was to see; scat and hesitancy

the brilliance of a star, the sapphire’s boxed array
the cobra beside the stone & all I saw
was the nought on the scales as the snake moved, not the crowds
nor the pigeon-egg diamond in the hilt of the vizier’s armory
the lock of hair or the hand of bronze to kiss

only egrets, white through lignite and soft hydrocarbons
and each wing a scant line of cartilage broken into ribs
of light and shade. Every time the line progressed like silk
iron deer, tin diamond and blue sky over Topkapi
dismembering the fortuity of travel one stop and bracketing

this was the world as it existed for our amusement
satisfactions snipped from empirical brochures entire
Ginza, Hadramaut, Nazca in six by four, milled, screened
& bleached to cuttle-ink by months of sun and wind
there are twelve, including the pyramids,

the tower in Paris, the bowed milk of the Opera
House and the silver heaped about Bilbao
the thin crenellations of a wall about hills
and the lights of a city west of an inland sea.
No distinction is offered; these are tokens only.

Your farewell is only the cuttings looking at me
their derivation is both more than ours and lessening;
the marketable and the promise of these cities both.
Either could be plain; though bells are ringing, it is only
the changes they are practising, fringes meshing into an airy

October night. And overhead a point of light travelling away
from the setting sun, the falling station describing its sere arc
before it passes behind clouds and enters the shadow of the world.