If I know anything
I know this
That the end of the world will be
unexpected
And will come from somewhere
nobody expected
And that straightaway
for as long as there is
People will say
they saw it coming
As if the moon finally spiralled into the earth
Material queue sieved for death by death
each waiting – these
things – for ease let’s call them people;
candles of corpses, yes, yes
don’t follow them
we follow them and
The sea’s gelatinous foam tells
them just how welcome (with surface
clinging to surface and the wind, by tension
dreary and wearisome this forsaken country.
was the scum of livid weed on the dark
greasy surfaces of the sullen waters.
Dead grasses and rotting reed loomed up in the mists
like ragged shadows
most welcome in this swelling tide
for there is no evil here –
there is only this mercurial life
You and me, and also
world-endings, chance gifts of death,
to bevel slowly a sound to a knife edge
where one of them (of us) stands alone
on the iron-fold brink
come to the very midst of the dead
marshes, and it was dark
grit from the serration drag
Alone
Alone on the sunk-sending
are dead things
dead faces in the water
A fell light
all hope painstakingly lost
human stories are practically
always about one thing,
aren’t they?
Then,
Then, a suddenness on the sea-wind
brings with it a breath, one breath
they heard
a long, wailing cry
high and thin and cruel
a deep unending breath
And elgar swings his legs
to the side of the sweat-ridden sheets
reaches, grasps the rough curtains
to open a sliver of blinding sunlight and a piercing
light to blind him
pierces, morning-sun made midday
by the darkness of the nest-depression –
Anything obscene is blessed in this world and has a reward –
I ask for no reward –
only to live, Jaeger
thus – scribbles a new moon, haltingly
to arc and draw the tide
one more inhumanity to blast us
No more dragging the mass
embarrased behind –
Nothing else has changed
but the sea now runs forward,
salted tears in its eyes.
rubbing their eyes,
like children wakened from an evil dream
to find the familiar night
still over the
world
And now the in breath ends
now – hear companion-cries
to send us
Home.
Wraiths! he wailed.
Agonised listening, myth-carving
as grandparents become myths
even as remembered.
Wraiths on wings!
westering far away beyond Tol-Brandir
and a vast fire-storm in the east
with a rush the wind came upon them
burning
hissing and snarling over the marshes
burning, burning
for a moment
the night became less dark
light enough for them to see
shapeless drifts of fog
for ease lets call them people
looking up they saw the clouds breaking and shredding
and then high in the south the moon glimmered
out
* * *
leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machine are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What’s their next move? – Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
8, 3×8, Storm 6
Then, I heard the thunder would come
but mouths murmered, the top end cut
So I never really got it
Their predictions had none or less
crunch or grind to my mouth, my eyes
now the thunder here, behind woods
does the scrape that only skies do
dumps all the folds in the stratos
rattling the bin of history.
We are talking, when the thunder
comes, stops us, sets us up on posts
ready for the whip-cracks, the fright
deep fright of the millions year
dark creep of the cloud-shadow, fast
ancestor. It puts us on edge.
I love it so much I could end
arms outstretched with one last static
shock to end all shocks, to end storms.
But you still tend orchids outside
As the rain tends all other plants
then sit close and we wait breath tensed
baited with small sounds to draw out
deeper ones. Each new paradigm
storm sound to teach all others how
–
2, 3×6, Storm 5
Thunder comes once when I
am stood among poetry
among the old books, new
Only once, but enough
to set a featureless
day in stone memory.
Here legs run and their humans
A pack of females, entangled
But they laugh, they joke
There are rivalries.
That’s okay, that’s not the worst
By any means. The field is clear.
Across the way small brown birds
Forage for worms, for shoots
And all the while the sun slides
In and out of haze and clouds
And thin sheets of light glint
From many soft lenses.
Sylvia, nature,
It’s not the lack of inner life
This simple celebration.
It’s simple, but not only simple.
You can keep honey hives, you can.
But certain bees can clump and sting whenever.
Death is difficult
As still preparing to fight
Knowing you will lose
Nudging a record
off half-way through. Difficult
But we cope, we cope.
If you are alone
Last out the morning, listen
For far off thunder.
tonight the totality of human knowledge
hit me on the head
I saw it coming out of the corner of my eye
but I couldn’t move in time
so I stood transfixed.
and it impacted my skull.
a small knowledge, the one I had
shoved, shot out the other side
and now I can barely speak
by what right do even these marks carry meaning
I garble at the passing of the gargantuan object
but –
it all looked the same
so many fragmented taxonomies
so many grey papers,
and shock only at the mass
there is the solace.
the golden wisdom of myself.
slowly I engage again the differential.
Two cats curl up
in a seat
with a blue patterned cover
and under that cover
there is a crumpled up bed-sheet
and as they curl up
the white patches of their fur
make a kind of broken up blob
which someone (not me)
if asked
might call a heart.
I look, and then
I lie down in bed
and read
and I don’t look at the empty side
of the bed.
