Delta

The river is of uncertain source, 

woven from squabbling tributaries

whose rival claims of precedence

are lost in clamouring torrent

from which the cartographer 

must braid a single name

as they wrestle each other 

in a meandering bout

across the flood plain.

Those with no sense of direction

insist they lead the way, 

and with the best will in the world

do the most damage. 

They finally unravel in marsh

as the river approaches the sea.

A delta is a step change

but who will draw the line

to say where the river ends

and the sea begins? All we know

is that there is a point of no return

we recognise only once it has been passed,

an increment that we can reckon

only after it has been accrued,

that makes the difference 

between distraction and futility,

and the end of our journey 

is a process, not an event.

All dooms are relative. 

We can persuade ourselves 

we are wiser than fools

while fate hesitates to contradict us. 

At some point we know better. 

We cannot predict when.

A dance before dark

Substance becomes process.

A barricade of lipid protects
the first dance, a swirl of steps
watched and copied by bases paired 

in purposeless replication.

For a billion years blue bacteria plumes
belch an oxygen atmosphere for us.

Mycelia discover minerals,
excavating the stuff of life from rock.
Vegetation thrusts roots
through soil made from its own death
in resurrectionist curiosity.

We watch vapour trails criss-cross the sky,
connecting departures to destinations
that lie beyond unbreachable horizons
marking the rim of our saucered lives.
Children play beneath the blue sky

on the sea ice in winter
oblivious to season and hazard.

The expanding cosmos whispers
heretical panspermic mysteries,
as the vacuum itself stretches 
like skin over something else

growing fat on something less,
some dark wine pressed
from still-born grapes grown
in shadow soils that compensate
for life's invasion of the wasteland,

vines growing upside down
under the sea ice, fed by roots
that sprout upwards, invisible,
to coil round our hearts
and siphon off our breath
into a crop of lies,

as stars deplete

what we describe as fuel, 

as though it was deliberate,

as though there is a point,

to illuminate, for a little while,
in this dance before the dark. 

We never learn

We never learn 

from celestial indifference. 

We never learn. 

We demand stars care

when we wish upon them, 

dream moons weep and dwindle

when our hearts break, 

imagine clockwork orbits 

make manacles for the divine

with the names we give planets,

and never learn. Prayer needs air, 

being just words, just sounds,

and remains forever Earthbound. 

The vacuum listens

only once we stop speaking,

but we never learn to be silent. 

We never learn. 

Instrumentality

What? 

What did you say? 

What kind of thing is this?

This sound you offer me: what is it for? 

A word? Is it a vehicle for meaning?

Is it a tool for creating meaning?

Maybe it is like a spade.

It seems to me it is like a spade.  

We can use it to dig an escape tunnel,

imprisoned in Château d'If, like Abbé Faria,

using words to tunnel towards each other

from our solitary confinement, 

or perhaps it's a stone.

We tap out an insistent jailhouse Morse 

upon the plumbing that passes through our cells, 

infiltrating the isolation of others

with news that our solitude is fictional, 

or maybe it is a ticket for a train, 

taking us from some tense internal exile 

in some chill northern town in Siberia 

to a warm Black Sea resort and a tearful reunion 

with those who also always knew the thaw would come, 

this day where we reveal to each other 

secrets we already knew but couldn't say out loud 

across the kind of distances that describe the steppe, 

knowledge of love shared long before it is confessed

in our cheerful comparison of heart-hoards.

Is it a crowbar, a tool to extract the abstract 

from the everyday objects in our hand, 

to prise and peel the colour red from an apple 

so that we can use it to describe the hues 

that blush in the distant mists of Betelgeuse 

and stain the sands of Mars,

or is it a pick-axe, exposing precious ores 

that glisten in the marrow of our meanings, 

each blow splitting the seam of all our seemings,

or a pen, chronicling tautologies that taunt epistemologists 

from the misgivings of Meno to the ramblings of Rumsfeld, 

a tool to label everything unknown, to give it name?

Maybe it's a bellows, fanning the embers 

that illuminate the mansions of the heart 

with breathless protestations of admiration, 

filling us with love's strange surgery of heat,

reaching into our flesh and altering us forever 

in each other during the intimacies we share 

and contemplate later alone.

Perhaps it eludes our grasp, 

slipping through the net of benign cross purposes 

from which we weave those conversations

in which we imagine we catch the world, 

skipping with the unmoderated joy of a child 

over the hop-scotch of coincidences that occur 

when we think we understand each other:

a living sound, created but not controlled, 

making each tongue chime with the turn of its heel 

as it dances out of reach,

and when we wonder why it avoids us, 

it laughs at the absurdity of our question. 

Our world is what happens when absence of purpose 

is observed by one intent on seeing reason, 

one determined to see meaning, whether it is there or not, 

and in doing so, binding time in knots of thought, 

knots that eventually unravel in ironic and depleted silence 

when we try to describe the impossible worlds 

where we can finally be together.

Veal

It behoves the beeves,

on calves behalves,

to reveal that veal's

their aftermaths. 

Portrait

Your job is not to paint a likeness. 

No, your job is to show people 

what I look like,

which is not the same thing. 

Nothing looks like itself. 

We all see something different. 

I am hideous. I am beautiful. 

Attempts at accuracy are doomed,

even, or most especially, 

when they seem most likely to succeed, 

for in that sense of reality you create

what do people see but the impossibility

of what you have attempted. 

Certainly not reality. 

Images are intercessionary at best, 

but we still need them

because nothing is possible 

without the impossible, and so 

your job is not to paint a likeness. 

Eulogy

When we consider the few scraps that remain

- the melodies he could be bothered to write down,
those bon mots that peppered his conversation,
a lyric he repeated when his own words failed him,
that joke he always told,
those embarrassing opinions he repeated,
a few chapters of a novel he never completed - 

what can we say? The rose we reconstruct 

from petals strewn in memory

blossoms entirely in our imagination. 

All we can say is who we imagine him to be, 

not who he was, which has now gone forever, 

and which we never truly knew while he was here.
So let us do that much at least,
inadequate as it is, for to do less
is to surrender to what he fought
in his own way, on our behalf. 

Downer

I've heard a successful poem

must be easy to understand
and immediately relatable.
Fuck that. I'm not writing this
so you will understand and relate.
Poetry is a compulsion.
Inspiration? The Muse?
A Tourette's syndrome of the soul,
not so much sparks of genius

as splinters from a shipwreck,
as I struggle to make myself whole.
I'm not trying to please you. 

You are the sea 

and I'm scared of drowning,

and this poem is how I keep that fear 

under control,

so just you sit there and shut up,

and don't ask any difficult questions,
like how do I feel. How do I feel?

I don't know
except it's not the same as you,
it was never the same as you,

it will never be the same as you,
and that's why you're down there
and I'm up here,
because otherwise you'd be up there
and I would be down here,

drowning.  

Curtain call

"Love me one last time," she said

as they lay on their bed.

Curtains drawn, light dim, diffuse,
he held her as he summoned himself.
They had rehearsed this embrace
for half a century,
learned each other's bodies
so completely since that first time,

that even though age 

had wrought its changes upon their flesh,
all memories ignited now at its end. 

Intimacy came easy, automatic,
caress muscle memory
in the tender repertoire of their love,
tempered now by that greater care
her precarious condition necessitated.
Afterwards they cried.

A bouquet of flowers stood
in a vase by their bedside. One week later
he lay them on her grave.

Catching the tide

The first time he tried to surf he failed.

He fell off his board when he stood up.
"The tide is out," his partner said.
The way this beach shelved
meant it put a shoulder to the sea.
The tide had to bring it so close
it almost reached the dunes,
like lips upon a neck with every wave,
for the conditions to be just right.
Later that night she came to him
unexpectedly, and took him by the hand.
The tide was in and together they surfed,
and afterwards they lay upon the sand
in each others arms, as the Moon came out. 

Test

What a strange litmus of my mood.

Sometimes the sound of seagulls
seems like mockery, sometimes lamentation,
but today they sound like they are celebrating.
I suppose I must be happy

New Year's Day

The year's last light retires in defeat.

Hopes unfulfilled and promises unkept,
embers of expectation cold, inert,
expire and fall silent at sunset,

and yet the new dawn at the darkness creeps
and hints that today maybe we shall meet
the inexhaustible repeal of every failure. 

Success beckons again across the gulf

that quicksand like between these midnight hurdles
elaborates the seasons of our struggles.