Skyscape

Burning past the ink-and-pen
futility of branches, how a sky these days
can bare its ribs, invulnerable.
My poor horizon, overgrown,
a brittle frame of silhouettes waits only
to be shaken off. Until the final
clarity of darkness, you
defy all grasping, terrible
and serene; my eyes are overfilled
with colours that are not mine.

Sonnet

And once the grim parade has finished
dragging past the windows, when
the blur of twilight settles
on a familiar scene, the workers
flee each other’s company; they know
too well the tatters of the afternoon
how soon the biting cold embarrasses.
But after all, if we could choose
to skip unworthy days, we storytellers
telling as we please, the final sighs
of autumn how they taste of loneliness
I would ignore. And then what shapes
for your eyes to trace would fill
these lines of longing, oh my heart?

Mortality

Finding the thought
disheartening, a yellow leaf
could only delay its fall
until I was passing.

Haiku

The Atlantic
Slides a glassy blade
Under the air

Adulthood

On a grey day spread too thinly
(slack as promises, the worn-out ties
that bound me to my birthplace
coil on a coffee shop floor) I fail
to meet your stare, you child
with eyes too bright a blue,

and I can’t explain.

Why should I explain to you?

Landscape with Sleeping Figure (c. 2009)

With a gesture
meant to shoo the raindrops
tapping on your sleep-cocoon,
you found the page I’d pressed against you,

blank as a harvested field.

My flighty words,
about to settle, scattered
like the flock enticed by a safer perch…

HISTORICAL NOTE

Rebellions of the sleeping
(used too long as writing desks)
will be indulged;
these are the moments
when writers fall deeper in love.

An Hent / The Road

The road across the fields to Saint Démet
by moonlight, long and solitary as
the Milky Way, leads aching feet
to the end of another of these days.
These days! They flash and disappear
like bubbles clinging to a cider bottle’s lips,
like laughter; in the night’s cool balm immersed
they (only now) obtain their solid form, their glaze,
their permanence. Dark at the edges, like
the houses near and distant turning
slowly into place, by moonlight:
pieces of the mobile—how it lulls our eyes—
we push with aching feet beneath
the Milky Way, on the road to Saint Démet.

Haiku

A tickled leaf
Shakes off
A butterfly

Haiku

The moon’s prow
Parts the clouds between
Two houses

Haiku

In this heat
The sky imitates
A snowdrift