On Washing Up on an Autumn Day

Elbow deep, water warm.

There is a squeak to ceramic,

a smooth slip, soap and cloth,

and fingers pink with work.

Eyes on the sky through glass,

on elder offering berries to birds,

on rain washed grass, and terry towelling

hung as a surrender to life and love.

And the thought in your mind,

open like palms held to the sun,

that the water and soap, the berries

and the translucent sky, are no less you

than flesh and bone. The air in your throat

no less you than birds uplifted by wind.

The world begins at your feeling fingers,

a Möbius strip in your hands.

A Whelk, Perhaps

I shall draw myself further in,
safe in these whorls. No feelers
feeling. No fronds out-turned.
A whelk, perhaps. Invertebrate.
Safe in myself with my eyes closed,
head drawn in, curved to the
contours of this calcification.
No man is an island, entire of himself.
But I can eke out the neck of
this peninsula. I can huddle like rock,
my spine an archipelago, undiscovered.
I can stay like a soft thing, washed
by waves, moved by eternal currents,
but always held. Always safe
in Fibonacci’s constant. Curved in,
and blind, and alive in my mind.

How The Shale Feels

I know how the shale feels.

That thin drifted piece, naked

in a pool of beach-cracked rock.

I know how each grain of

windswept waveswept sand

rubs a little and rubs again.

I know the effaced (un)importance

of the bedrock we press underfoot.

How it will not bend, but slowly erode.

How it will never bend,

but only snap once the scouring

is scoured enough.

I know you, you pressed out slab

of mud, once-alive remnant of

a time before, who teamed with microbe life.

I know that soft, soft weight of years,

that suffocating sleep

that slowly turns slip to stone.

And then the voice saying, We

will sit here. The tide’s on the turn.

Let us sit here and watch the slow sunset.

A good place to sit. And the hand

that touches the slab, small now,

scoured to thinness, feels the heat

of the day and the smoothness to the palm

and thinks nothing.

I know how the shale feels.

Isn’t There A Fanatic Somewhere In All Of Us?

What is it with you people?

You, who stand with your heads above the mist,

you with your Easter Island faces,

turned to the here and now, outward looking.

And I, here I am, elsewhere.

I balance on my straw raft,

float toward the horizon,

sea brine seeping past my toes.

In my delirium

I seek fresh water in the depths

and see monochrome men,

the lingering smoke of cigarettes,

the watch inturned and the hands adept.

Somewhere I lie with my face downturned,

my hands downstretched, catching

currents that left the shore decades past.

I couldn’t be happy in bobby socks

and outspread skirts. But.

But I will stand in the shadow by the dance hall wall.

I will watch them spin.

I will watch the play of muscle under skin,

the lucid eyes and the dark ones.

I will watch the sleek wet cling of cotton,

grained on film and left when life was vital.

I can look through the sheer water

and dream of the oxygen beneath the depths.

And dive, and dive again, and bring back pearls.

On Passing Her in the Street

Today we almost met.
You with your walnut heart,
your hatchet-blade face sharp-edged
straight on.
Today I realised how deep and wide
is the void between atoms.
How each of us is an emptiness,
each a spinning solar system,
more vacuum than dust.
Today I saw how even if I shouted
loud across that crackling void,
my words would slip between electrons
and fall, useless and unheard.
We none of us are really here,
and if I prised – or prized? – 
your walnut heart there would,
there would, be substance there –
but nothing to my taste. Nothing
but gall to my tongue.
I think, instead, I will hold facts close.
That each cell has its nucleus.
That each atom holds hands only with its kin.
That sometimes we can only speak
to those who speak back
in our own tongue.

On Moles On The Fence At Nebo

We saw your soldiers’ ranks, your
desecrated corpses. We saw you
hung, sleek, one by one,
a dirge on a your own stave.
You were such small trophies,
so small, each one. Each one
a glove of dark, smooth silk.
Each one a sorrow of its own,
head height to our child’s eyes.
There was no triumph in this conquest.
No triumph in your sad spade hands,
your aborted tails or quiet eyes.

Now I imagine Goldsworthy meeting Hirst.
Then only sadness in a wind-struck place.

The Smoker

We will take it from the exhale.
A single drift, a caress of your lips
and the soft pass of silk that billows.
The bloom of orgasm widening in the air.
Your lips part in the afterthought of a kiss.
The afterthought of all that is in you
widening in the air.

There is a dilation inside you.
Your pupils become pools,
your lungs expand. And
your shoulders fall, the strength
at bay. Your chair is an oyster,
your chair a resting place. Your head
tilts back and smoke rises. It is
no signal of distress, no call to arms,
but an incense for your peace.