Beginnings

Walking through the forest with little light,

eyes on stalks

or sunk back into my head understanding that

nothing they could do would help.

Slips of white moon fall between clouds and cut down

in amorphous blooms that carve roots into portions of abstraction.

We begin in breathless anticipation

of a life's headlong rush into knowledge;

young mind open like a flower to receive all understanding.

At a later time the only thing that becomes clear

is that we will never know

and however long our petals hold back against inevitable closure,

we will always be at the beginning and not the end.

Each day I begin again with you and all previous knowledge

sheds a small light on the wilderness and wildness.

We look at one another and our eyes show us only

skin, cloth, a movement in the shadows.

But I am walking through you, however unclear my path

and I know that I will find the way.

Descent

Descent

After coming down, after

not flying, turning from

a bird into a man

in all realities there was a change

at which moment perspectives

slid like glass doors or

the opening brass tubes of a

telescope and in that action

I was at once bound to earth

and free to soar.

The bird dreamed it was human,

could not lift clear, drift out

across the city roofs and blue sea;

but that was a dream and

the shell is not yet broken.

The bird is waiting.

Stairs

Each block of stone is chosen and cut from the earth,

Dressed and placed by hands bruised and aching,

Built into a cascading wall of rocks to make

A fall whose proportion fits the measured tread

Of all who pass and repass:

A mountain of graded crystal carried to form

Infinite potentials, energies locked with mortar

Giving our legs the power of flight.

I thought that I would speak to each stone,

Extract from its impassive face the truths

Grown through tectonic assault and skeletal collapse;

Offer my own energies in a trade,

Rub off a little skin in an erosion of all sense:

Donate breath, transfer heat, spend time upon.

In descent life is spent, born high then washed

Into the ocean like a grain of sand.

Skin Poems

Metal (my father)

Blood is like rust, crawling in crystalline

forms, unmaking geometry as benign

and calcareous kaleidoscopes

across the skin of human thought and hope.

Hopes are forged and riveted together,

children cast like coins or fathered

by a hammer swung in rhythmic comprehension;

a pattern to be copied through generations.

So I was made in the fire of my mother.

I am melted and reformed through ardour;

orange iron bones, ferrous flesh –

a conscious corrosion of all histories past.

-

Wood (my self)

Standing straight in bound fibres,

muscular trees are cut and dried like flowers,

roots and heads discarded. A stolid torso,

doughty arms sawn straight by metal jaws.

I marry wooden limbs, arrange assignations,

match-make, half-house, dove-tail for tension.

Un carpintero whose eye lifts and measures –

designing a fit for all parts with pleasure.

The passage of my saw through plank and rafter

marks the passage of its future and hereafter.

A creation through destruction, cutting to heal;

a shelter of roof and walls for life concealed.

-

Rope (that held me)

The beginning and the end are difficult,

but chiefly the end, whose strands, laid out,

are hard to unify because it is the nature

of fibres, once twisted, to unwind into the future so

this rope, by which my life hangs,

was made with the stalks of nettle and

each thread rolled between finger and thumb

to sustain a tension once begun

and every thread spiralled in will be

thicker as strands and strands, three on three,

together give the strength that hold me

clear of the earth

-

Paper(that holds me still)

An elegant summary, this sheet,

a temporary suspension of disbeliefs.

My life reduced to lines and flat,

sheaves of information caught, stacked.

A page is made from all the little pieces,

all the ends and scraps complete it.

Swollen with water; confused, adrift,

then squeezed and held until they stick.

My skin reproduce upon a skin,

pierced by points and cut thin;

a bold tattoo that beats the drum

of my life in words and pictures.

Feather Mammy

Frozen at the moment of inception

Cold beyond thinking

Father’s mother’s

Sister’s brother’s

Daughter’s

Son

Hips bones connected to the thighs

And the world keeps,

Feather mammy

Can’t keep still

Turning

Hammers knocking like a heart

On my ribs

Pulse thickening

Mind at a dead

Stop

Birds crackle overhead from

A sky electric

Grammar forms as ice

Rimed around my

Arms legs

The growl of a stomach outside

My door opens

And I walk through

My soul takes wind

I am born a loft

Perspectives clash lost in fog

Horns roar, I dance

Horns roar, I dance

My shoes don’t fit

Too well

One to ten counting quickly

Puts a finger on it

Chicken skin fits like shit

Red plumes and quills

Feathered

Shake a leg it won’t come off

Arms without bodies

Nothing to eat for days

Come in

Sit down

Working like a bee grown

Older than I’d care

Looking towards the sea

For something

To change

Writing into a corner cut

Off by letters

Feet out of control from

Warm applause I bow

Before you

Running up the mast

Like a flag I

Wave and wave

At where I think

You might be

Singing changes the mouth’s lines

And talking makes

Shapes in my back

Like chain links

And iron scales

Feather Mammy

Ran out

Of reasons

Coppice

Overwhelmed with visual information and flooded

over my eyes up into hairlines through follicles

lapping at the connections between sleep and not

lying where I fell and decomposing

amongst last year's hazel nuts left hollow by jays or squirrels

smelling rich and rotten between annual strata of leaves

fallen and lifted, levitating upon the points of bluebell stalks.

First to feel the primrose bloom, growing like an emotion

between my shoulder blades don't move, don't move

all moments pass and this will pass too soon

in a coppice in company with spring.

Saw

you

i saw you

you and that mouse

saw you and that bird

messing around in the kitchen

feathers everywhere and blood spots

saw prints and mud and fleas and worms

heard a racket in the middle of the night at three

i saw you sit on my knee and purr like nothing happened

stick your claws in my knee cap until it bled five dots

dribble down the side of a clean jumper gone crusty

breath like something died in your mouth

because it did and kakky bum planked

where ever it likes trip me up

why don't you so take

a swipe at me now

and again

you