New Poems
| Still Life We have slipped by here, scarcely noticed, for generations; the trees we planted, oak and birch and eucalyptus, scarce reached our knees those days, now they rise stooping amongst scattered stars, against turquoise deepening to blue-pink, emerald, cobalt; we know – after the old folks with their hearth-music abandoned us – generations are layered beneath, and still the young hare leaps in the joy of morningflush while the mismatched mistlethrush will cock her speckled chest into the northern breeze: as it was, we say, in the beginning. I will turn soon into the broth of dreams, blue-pink, emerald, cobalt, a blade of grass of being, but for now I hold my hand against the sky and watch a star between my fingers, see the webbed flesh, feel the blood pulsing, and listen to the soft sigh lingering. for Michael Schmidt July 2008 |
| The Nest A dark world, its stench and cramp, its scramble, up in the acute angle of the gable wall, the jutting roof in its occlusion, dumping dark on dark; and then the beaks, yellow and livid and big almost as the bone-fluff bodies, the blind struggling for space, the sudden yawp for worm to be stuffed in the gawping maws from above; until there came a death of sorts, the adults urging, and the young swift was out and tumbling, sickeningly, down; but something within its being bloomed and there, suddenly, was the whole and unforeseeable earth and unlimited sky, the brash exultant rush of its body in instant mastery of the elements, those open meadows of the sky, those cloud-suffused blue fields, blue pasture-lands. August 2008 |
| Shelf-Life From a side-hook in the pantry, Old Moore's Almanac for 1943, its pages browned from the pipe-smoke of Grandpa Time, and one china cup without its handles, a small blue boat drifting towards the bridge; one Knock-shrine mug, repository for two brass keys that have lost their locks; a brawn-coloured oval roasting-dish, its cracked-over surface criss-crossed with the trackways of old Europe; a Rowntree's Cocoa tin, its comely maiden watching out onto hurrying time with a face of wonder; a carriage-clock without its hands, standing in its final after-tock; Hallow-e'en tin rings without their lustre; a Brigid's Cross, the rushes dried brittle as old wicks; and there, in a cardboard box, the mixed-up bits of Lego, Meccano, jigsaws, those building blocks of a world to be. Two off-green, birthday balloons, wrinkled and out-of-breath, string still knotted like scarves on their scrawny necks, and there, on the top shelf my tin-ware porringer from lunch-time school, long emptied of my peaceful indifference to all things. Finally, me, here mooching about in my ghosthood over shelves no longer there. January 2010 |
Public House
It stood, discreet, amongst honest houses,
porter barrels tolling by the wall outside; within,
a flagstone floor, a fudge of smoke and hawking,
the round man behind the bar taciturn, graceless;
mother said it was the heaving weather of original sin
drew him in, for we are transients, pilgrims, falling
to our knees at times before unholy shrines. Began,
for him, as a faltering of resolution and he ducked,
disarmed, into the darkness, as the will falls
like a green bottle smashing itself against the flags.
But there were times, countering it, he crossed
the highest furrows of the mountainside, hunting
for goat, its wild slithering, its grazing; the bullet
in the flesh-flank of the beast was a love-song
and a gesture of despair. He stood to watch
the richening gold-light on the corrie hill,
a heaven-beam, Genesis-feet, that moved across
the mountain-side; and stood to listen to the gulls
in the next-door harbour at their disputations
speak the week’s histories of calamitous events:
the tarnished china of a sheepskull and the windy
acres of its eyes, the battling through against harsh days.
Thislife, say the gulls, is that unstable province
where we scavenge behind the trawlers’ arabesques,
while the human dead are taken down
into the heaving, unlit corrie
of the waves, where they fall, disarmed and slow,
down, down out of all weathers, down, like seeds.
December 2009
It stood, discreet, amongst honest houses,
porter barrels tolling by the wall outside; within,
a flagstone floor, a fudge of smoke and hawking,
the round man behind the bar taciturn, graceless;
mother said it was the heaving weather of original sin
drew him in, for we are transients, pilgrims, falling
to our knees at times before unholy shrines. Began,
for him, as a faltering of resolution and he ducked,
disarmed, into the darkness, as the will falls
like a green bottle smashing itself against the flags.
But there were times, countering it, he crossed
the highest furrows of the mountainside, hunting
for goat, its wild slithering, its grazing; the bullet
in the flesh-flank of the beast was a love-song
and a gesture of despair. He stood to watch
the richening gold-light on the corrie hill,
a heaven-beam, Genesis-feet, that moved across
the mountain-side; and stood to listen to the gulls
in the next-door harbour at their disputations
speak the week’s histories of calamitous events:
the tarnished china of a sheepskull and the windy
acres of its eyes, the battling through against harsh days.
Thislife, say the gulls, is that unstable province
where we scavenge behind the trawlers’ arabesques,
while the human dead are taken down
into the heaving, unlit corrie
of the waves, where they fall, disarmed and slow,
down, down out of all weathers, down, like seeds.
December 2009
