Consciousness
Seven poems thinking about consciousness
The Tree
The tree is an enthusiasm of pulsing chlorophyll,
branches creaking like gossiping harbour boats,
it hosts a begatting of greens –
the eye-green of a deepriver fish trancing the reed roots
thinking forgotten-mud slow,
begats the spritegreen of atmospheric electrical phenomenon
only the black satellite can see
begats gangrene-green,
chop-it-off green,
bite-leather-and-think-of-the-Lickey-Hills green,
begats witches’ milk green,
begats the spiky and dark-sermon green of a Christmas wreath.
The tree moves as one thousand unfaithful mouths.
The tree smells like the earthworms’ god,
of ever-shifting shade, of wooded acceptance.
It has a scent so wise and nuanced,
so placidly fungal, so soul slow,
it feels like awareness was always this.
The tree moves like a new mother.
Dressing table
A dressing table
is being pursued
(so very slowly)
around the room
by a wardrobe.
Its thin, turned legs
of gasped-mouth blue
push against the carpet,
purpling up fluff.
A wall away
the wardrobe looms,
heavy with clothes
and intent
and shoes.
And Catholic saints
(in postcard form)
hang in frames
and reflect upon
the frantic scene.
Bicycle Day in school
Very little I was in World –
that curly thing of reddening wind,
of slush gathered shiftily in the village,
of Pentecosts and corn-dollies,
of mice in the kitchen, lost from the field.
That curly thing made just for me,
in the unimaginable season before I arrived.
Very little I was, and in the first school.
Afternoon it was in the village
as dark snuck up, cosy as a closing book,
full of leaves and lovelessness,
wheeled like a portable haunted house,
pushed by ghosts to where it was needed next.
And a man from the council came to teach us
how to ride bicycles on the road.
Each of us given a reflecting disc
for between our spokes.
Very little it was, though it glittered deeply.
A dream point.
See-through. Two small sides sandwiching
a benign cataclysm of prisms,
a flowerbed of geometry
catching light, growing magic.
Greenthenindigo
treaclesweet genii.
Orangethenyellow
stairways, beauty as descent.
Bluethenred
smaugish voxels,
rainbow tails around
spectrums of treasure.
Under bright stern bulbs of the scuffed school hall,
very little I was, cross-legged and long grey socks,
and I stared at the disc in numinous bliss.
There in scintillating new folding colour
I met the great psychedelic other.
More than the dazzle, the hologramic battle
of butterflies, was the Godcontained –
concentrated existence, unseen except by me –
later I’d feel the same in unlit hallways with tiled floors,
darkness echoing the edges,
and the sound of the city somewhere else.
Egg
In the sixteenth museum room,
in visitors’ currents,
swung a model Earth. Segment
forgotten to see through the crust,
mantle and skinish layers
and find a Dante-fury melt
of BigBang-nostalgic magma.
Where is the past?
Here come old men aching
from amputation of anchoring.
Here come old men,
to unfold new moans
like handkerchiefs for salting
picnic pickled eggs on.
The devil
The devil is in the garden.
In the house-shadow hardened
by the depositioned sun.
In the cooked, crumbleblack soil
turned open by seed and toil
and the chewed language of Enoch’s worms.
In the weeds that delinquent the edges.
In the raspberry-shaded cat steadily, steadily
long-licking its tail until it’s never done.
In the butt of gutter water with the sweet-rot
smell, in the spider’s web corner-knotting
the shed, in the foxglove nodding itself numb.
In the dripping honeysuckle, the fainted rake.
The white wind from the fields, the vacant
chrysalis, the lust of the rose, the ivy’s run.
In the moss-chocked bricks
he says ‘this isn’t bliss,
your God of grass has won.’
If I have ever been loved
If I have ever been loved,
may it be for what I love in myself.
And if I have never been loved
little boy, it’ll be because
I could not accept myself. Acceptance
metaphor. The morning bomber’s mothering hum.
Lulled, August-white sky.
Even coldmountain echoes
pacify, like milk.
Nuclear codes radio in.
Belly doors open with a rich man’s pride.
An atomic cloud sucks up itself selfishly
and sucks up all the shadows of the city
into the impossible entelechial object.
Generals and pilots accept that this is what
they must do and you, too, must accept that
this is what the unloved do.
If I have ever been loved,
may it be for what I love in myself.
5am on the shore of Lake Coniston
Here the world is … now, there’s a
self-centred start, this isn’t the world,
everywhere are other centres, where
others are burning through their lives.
Here the early morning is ... again, no,
to be time-locked is to be the lake,
shimmering-ignorant of the sea, thinking
swells are the troubling of eternity.
Well then, let’s begin with
the things I am aware of ...
ah, but see that division between me
and the all – that way war lies –
maybe … what my awareness is
endlessly brushing … closer, though
still a lapsarian disconnect, instead, perhaps,
what my consciousness joins ...
yes!, that’s it! so we open ...
here what my consciousness joins ...
is vigorous in its stillness.
New sunlight an electrolyte etching on the water
of what ripples look like to the artist.
Fresh birdsong its mirror – acoustic etching on air.
A brief fish turmoil in the lake on my left,
behind me a fenced field swung into shadow
by deep trees which gathered years ago.
A dozy meadow still damp from night’s dark foam,
though on the dawn-burning edges
dew is returning to the sky.
Sheep in the field have idled nearer,
thoughtless, solid, rough, snagable,
feet full of secret skips,
their business the steady tearing of grass.