Poems – Aesthetic

Three Poems after Amelia Humber

Goss

After Amelia Humber

The tongue of the cosmos mouth
drags its mist along the pond
many eyes of the coral
or barnacle prayers impact
with a soft white thud and cloud
on the world’s hill – and deeper
the deep ink behind things seeps.

–

I stand in the softened copse
of the shore – rain drenched but warm
unnamed white flowers blow here
amongst the heather – their heads
bob and jump in the quantum
breeze – where I once might have thought
I now dwell with the land’s power.

*

Coopers

After Amelia Humber

Strobe lights over the shallows.
The marsh flows, hardly, but still
it flows here with the thin grass
so thin and black, it’s like hair.
A magnesium surface
and water, as the flock-spheres
make their debris way through air

–
In the mist there are things now
things you never wanted but
were offered for your viewing –
A procession of faceless
saints, a small black sheep hovers
legless, only seen in dark,
an entirely different sky

*

Point

After Amelia Humber

With a faint humming, negate
the sky as an unreached space
(a space we can hardly grasp)
and split open a vault – to
the dark above the grave pit
ridden with frost and snowlit
pourings – through this chasm tear

–
see the world as it could be
bare of all ground, all solids
floating in nothingness – then
between abyss and abyss –
as it sees you – iris
vaster even than god’s eye
and the pupil that screams ‘live’

*

Painting credit to https://www.ameliahumber.com/

Two Poems

A Visit to Sylvia Plath’s Grave

Seeds of grass, pods of a clock
rock in the wind which picks up
and the dog barks once – we climbed
up green cobblestone steep street
and playground to Heptonstall
saw the abandoned ship drift
along a gravestone sea-path

and bump against the present.
It talked, the wind, it said words
from a wind tongue, softly, out
of itself in hidden verses.
A button is enough, placed
In her dirt. Sigh with the breeze,
over the empty space

The Ouse

The river never rests – pushed
by its own waters, it runs
pulled forward with earth-mass speed
round the bend in the land depth,
and at every moment, rain
sinks from the hills around – ends
with a collapse, its own path.

It is so fast and soundless
this – small orgasm of force
trillionfold, rumble drowned.
So perfectly the river
is loved by the rainfall – I
would have such friends.

Loki

Okay. The colours of the world
are so bursting from everything
when I drive the car home that I cry
or almost – just to see the patterns

how subtle, how elementally subtle
there is no easy way to say this
how the greens between greens are vast
hold whole languages with space to pass by.

the trees at the traffic lights, with branchmass
reach out for a future less worrisome
in a concorde of orange, yellow, and greens –
Fireworks pretend to the complexity

and brightness of these trees.
This is not hyperbole. Reach, I say.
I go home and make the beds
for my family, forget the night –

except your eyes, holding mine
like a caught spider in their blue fire
never relenting, and your smile. My friend,
I create endless worlds to match it

The Unplanned

What better way
to give the lie
to Descartes

than to stand
in the muggy heat
here, on the periphery

where seed foam rises
up between us –
the city in a depth of shade

Where cloud and sun judder –
undecided
who will win the day.

The heat and sweat will have it
drawing the patchwork
city deeper into distances.

No one mind held this.
And yet – here it is
Miyazaki perfect.

Dame Autumn Hath a Mournful Face

After John Atkinson Grimshaw

You don’t yet know the fae.
Its church arches and bones.
It overlays on the trees
which become a seething delta

How the pools reflect black
to spite what they note above them
never sure of the horizon
your gaze wanders, unceasing

thin and twisting flowers
the green, and floating flakes of gold leaf
the faintly blue of the night
then, which slips alongside – her;

uncreasing the folds between worlds –
her insect wing-shimmer. And bright
shines one thing nakedness can do
mournfully at you, with a crown of flowers

The fae curves just like this.
It worships with patient light
that which you may worship.
If she wants you, touch the canvas.

Two Poems

Sillhouette

The sun makes silent
all the small planets
of inner orbits
and we only hear –
when they pass in front;

The stars have planets
which tug the belly
of their nuclear
mass explosion – soft
but more than enough;

In the lower tones,
of the dawn rise – there
the small star, has grace
for one still moment –
in the day soon lost;

The world compels us.
We are charred by void
when its emptiness
eclipses ours – but
soft glow the small stars.

Memory of Florida (Helplessness Blues)

What I used to be, and now
what I am, as we drive down
motorways through forest mass
listening closely with my voice
align like an eclipse moon
and the past blooms in present
rapture – I love this album

Old as I get, I will not
forget the forest drifting
drowsily past the window
this rain sifting tambourine –
And damp strung up on song lines
for this perfect alignment
in time and of void cultus.

Us

I

you bite your nails outside
the coffee house – you sit
next to me your perfume
hums through me like a bird
flock sat on my black wires
your hair curls up – I look

deep into its spiral
I sit – across from you
you eat sweets – your tongue floats
on my pool like tadpoles
gulp it – each time you change
my want for you goes on

II

god If all I could eat
were the crumbs from your mouth
That fall, I would rejoice,
And survive, I swear it
A diet of your voice.
If it were my only,

choice, my only choice
to be smashed by your car –
the car of your body…
I would giggle loudly
as I registered each
sacred injury’s pulse.

III

What can I say? I feel
Like the anti-cactus.
Your clothes might as well be
vanished along with all
your skin and bones and me
for all the attention

I give them, your language
just the tongue, floats, hovers
still in the centre of
clearings in woods by nests
warms nests, damp nests, we talk.
The city crawls with us