In hot luxury lie palatial plazas
And football pitch pools
Placing garden cut vistas
through the forest.
The forest of deer and martens
Now fenced in by traffic or death
Traffic that lives through the rain and the smell of freshly cut corn
Wet and dusty evaporating
in the sun like a grill iron
glowing with the wind.
Ruffling birches
take the rain away and sweet sounding Melun surprises
with high rise and low flow.
The wheat is still ripening
This July
While everlasting sweet peas still
spill down the railway embankment
The sun still warms
through breaks in the cloud
While my father waits
On a cold shelf
To be transformed
Taking some of this world with him
Power assisted doors enclose
And envelope musty sweet artichoke aromas.
Damp jurassic greens climb titanic stems
like trees, under glass
A slow prehistoric blanket
of mountaineering moss floods fibre haired stems
Ringed and ridged
To protect from giant tortoise teeth
Weak black tea
Brown and bronze
Stones rounded
Flood dry debris mounded
Flitted and perched by yellow wagtail
Fledgelings and wrens
It balances me
The one sided weight that carries me
A curvaceous case with waist contained
Taught with strings and horsehair
Pads and powder in secret pockets
and velvet black vibrations like memories held in amber
A black box of perfect proportion
Closed not opened
Held in
A disc of dawn from my eastern eye
I stand before
The grey front at dusk
On rarely seen plain ivy vein
Dark scattered steps of green weave down
To the sleeping screen of dark water.
Brambles scramble over ancient ditches
and the fox tracks under forgotten fences
wend dry dens under long dead elder,
leaning and cracking with the weight of others.
Who knows here?
Not the screeching parakeet fleet
Not the siren bumbling through crowded cars
nor the silent roar of the London bound.
The little oak river runs rapid beyond the bank of flint and earth
Shrouding in dusk,
Receding from versimilltude
Cinnamon and cinnabar and giant marzipan
Melting mango fibered flesh oozing
syrup above scatterings of scuttling sail chinned dinosaurs.
Swarming stripes of black and yellow
ripple on frangipani – a name I don’t remember
except for tropical Plumeria smells of heat and rich sun on pale skin.
The streamlined horns and bulbs of red escape,
then eat their elegant umbrellas.
Hornet warnings flash for the birds
and coqui frogs, in the night, chirping beyond their bounds.
A cacophony of pings and sings
summoning shooting stars from the Pleiades
to scratch the darkness
To scratch the reflection in mosquito waters
The swirls of stars and galaxies in paddles wake
Chunks of light tumble from my hand
as drip trails fish follow shooting in the shallows
like a splash of silent light
Quiet in the mangrove night
I miss your mess of grey white hair
Your tufted stretch of leather,
over taught warm muscle.
I miss the deep tearing mouthfuls of grass
Chewing like a typewriter cartridge on elastic strings of slobber
Your super tongue, feeling, like a handful of fingers.
You were running for fun
Drumming the soil with half ton hooves
with high kick flicks and snorts.
We saw you as dusk raised a magic moon
and mist lost your numbers in a slow drift swoon.
I miss your eyes, your dark crystal skies
Etched with shadows and lined with long lashes
To keep off the splashes
of shit, sometimes smeared by your friends
A green grey stain, waiting for the rain to restore
Your soft cheeks.
Your black ears cocked and swept
Like folded felt shells
Seaching for warnings,
fore and aft.
When all else is peace
Quiet great masses slumped together
Stretched sacks of stomach, digesting,
And steaming at dawn
A mist that fails to lift
The ground without horizon
Just a banana yellow strewn floor
and leaves falling
occasionally overtaken by condensed drips of daylight
The damping down of a day done
before it has begun,
cut through by light of the approaching night