Magick
If I call salt
tongue-shrinking sea-grain,
and tell you beauty is a gateway
to enlightenment
and then point out
the centurion oak in the village school
that I hid my loneliness behind,
and if I took you to the nevernow railway track,
lusting from its earth, twisting in rusted freedom,
where Andrew and I would walk stoned
in the shimmer of corn fields and corn fields,
and if I asked you to imagine
the new space,
dark with tongues,
you and I would make if we kissed,
then promise you a moment
as cool as the quieted twigs
in the hedgeshadow of a meadow
hot with buttercups,
and if I sang long of the vicious,
and about betrayal being a line
of tongue-shrinking sea-grain
that runs from another
straight to my heart
that is an iron railing
losing the last of its paint,
then you would know
all my secret places.
Seven poems thinking about magick
Supernovas and blueberry donuts
We live between
supernovas and blueberry donuts.
Aeonic imagination, immediate sensation.
How beautiful is the insistent velvet
of a horse’s nosing trust? And afternoons
when rain terribles the sky, leaving no place
for light? And afterwards, when light noses back
and trees shake a toughearth scent over everyone,
how beautiful is it all?
When I am a star I’ll take my time to explode.
I’ll bloom in the black crackle of space,
exploring all the wavelengths.
Until then, give me sugar.
Time of death
The scientist Feynman liked the idea
that positrons were electrons
moving backwards through time.
In the birthmonths of the bomb
he was called from Manhattan,
(shrouded-project not the borough),
to watch his beach-fresh, cool-water wife
die young.
25. TB. Mysteriously
the mushroom-belled
bedside clock stopped
when she did.
He dismantled the device
to work out why,
as sorrow blasted through him
like the litterwind.
Years unstable, old spring clumsily fitted,
cog teeth sticking to rusty seconds,
so when the brisk, iodiney nurse
lifted it to record time of death,
the insides unbalanced again.
That was the answer.
Grief is love moving backwards.
Blue
My rightnow sky
is ultra-calmexcitement blue.
It holds an overwhelming nothing
and is bigger than my heart.
It is a pupil to look through,
a master painter’s single, sutured brushing,
the opposite of cherry blossom,
a perfect love affair, a mirror
reflecting just one perfect high.
It is bigger than my heart.
I keep choosing tarot cards
that futuresay I must let go.
Falling upwards is terribly hard
you know, fooling uncontrollably up
into ultra-calmexcitement blue.
Fable
Young land, drugged unconscious by heat,
groans a little in its sleep grown
anxious by treasure – buried, meant
for a warring king’s fightbent return,
but now only haggard birds will dig,
wailing for their lost, bluedead eggs.
And we, him and me, head to see
the latest circle in the crop
in the longmonth of rumours of lights
in the longfield where we took the sap
of seasons and slow slow smoked it,
like freckle-princes under enchantment.
There is a tree, silhouetted
from every point. It becomes
our world. We become centaured,
legs in play, heads dreaming horns
or neurons thorning in prickled birth
or antennae. You choose your path.
On the parish council battles
of planning permission erupt.
Elsewhere a rockgod dies, suckles
on a shotgun, swallows an eclipse,
and I need a life to understand
a summer of sunsets without end.
And we, him and me, head to see
the wailing famer’s barn burn down
in the giftmonth of unexplained fires,
moths going rocket, boys shouting ancient.
Then home, the purgatorial stair, bed,
a sense of adventures not yet had.
Tea time chiaroscuro
Father drives home
through cones of corrugated lamplight
drawn in traffic fume rain
and bird-maw autumn dark and the deep
of the street after another nothing day.
Children eat chips,
sitting in nylon school uniform
and the blaze of bulb light
with pink cordial, bread and butter,
and a 5pm sense of what comes later.
Merrily, merrily
I thumb birdbath ice, birth a bombskirt of exhaust,
see aerials nose for TV through happenstance snow.
I shake happenstance hands in the smug-bright porch
of a midnight church warmed by the mid-winter show.
I watch castles at fetes inflate, like drunks gathering feet,
see dewy girls unfurl as greening ferns.
Mob a maypole, walk widdershins on Lovers’ Leap,
a dot of man leant to axis mundi’s morning turns.
Now noughts of tyreswings sway
in the dawn boil of elysian days.
A halfboy slumbers sundrowned
under the sundream of drowsy bees
and somewhere cars with tense ribbon Vs
are registry-idle, ready for the off.
Merrily, merrily, life has split Margaret May
like a chestnut shell – she’s spiked, gaping,
territorially tending a dewy grave.
Over the way, down Church Lane,
children ford and forge the leafy shallows,
zipped up in coats and self-hugs of hallows.
I stand skulled. Priest of the rake.
Offering branch to empty bonfire
for redemptive barksmoke.
And there! The quickrolling rockets fly,
the unfurl of science across an exhausted sky.