river

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

On Beauty

Considered with reference to bodies

Standing water, in the cold night
reflects the crisp moon,
thin stars in the eye’s quiet corner

In its shallows the dark leaves rot
starving greens and wriggling things
’til stillness reigns

There is only so much you can get
from a reflection –
just ask these dying flowers on the shore

But a river – god damn it
just look – look at that flow
It goes where it wants to

But slip up, take a photo
and there! It’s a pool again.
For gods’ sake delete it

Let us leave all our still disasters
a night of stars, devastated
without their flutter, their refocus and shift

and lay paper puppets, torn and sullied
by the fire which crackles with time
and burns with everything you needed

V.49

We are not built to think of space
of true beginnings and endings
when the book becomes less and more
when cups and paths and horses fall

off the registry of items –
yet we do and it brings a break
in thought to the page. The blue roar
of water as I’m arriving

at work, draws back concepts like a
curtain / The sun on the water
is scintillating like a proud
child. Light blue eyes encapsulate

me and the red waters rise. Rain
on the air after a storm, rain’s
ghost captures small insects on its
silk. Far off a head of thunder

attempts to drag itself out of
the blue. As I’m leaving work, I
become tangled in the silver
linings. The car is hot, I put

Takk by Sigur Rós into the
CD slot and feel antiquate.
The end of things is far from me
and the cool breeze. The sun blinking

V.48

It is remarkably easy
crossing rivers, over the grass
that is submersed. I walk across
the bridge and turn, see my vampire

friends shivering and swearing there
typing fragments of disgust at
this thing which flows on and never
likes or retweets anything. Wow

I say, just wow. Come on over.
They can’t. Their undead hearts pump blood
borrowed from moment to moment
from various devices. Who

am I kidding? My thoughts are run
through with desire paths. My
thumbs are tired and I can’t think.
I try press the river into

service as a question, a graph
an interesting friend, a text.
But the water keeps on going
and eventually cracks out

of my phone screen, as I walk on,
fizzing like a burst pipe, I sigh
and my clothes are drenched. Their toothy
grins follow me, as I trudge on

V.39

I thought I was done writing love
poems. Then I had a moment.
Now the only poem that’s worth
thinking about consists of your

name, repeated as many times
as the structure will allow it.
The river is getting drier
and revealing my face, my hands

supplicant, on the cracking shore
encased in mud and algal growth
A face of pain, or quietness
and ducks scamper about on it,

clouds of gnats making me avert
my gaze. Can I redo this verse?
It was meant to be a love poem
I’ve lost track of what’s going on

When the new becomes coeval
with the dreamlike, we know true life
in our world has reached a strange point.
I assume the sun once felt like

a hand caressing your shoulder,
I assume. I think of your hand
caressing my shoulder like breath
pours out from within – there we go

V.26

When Heraclitus said all that
about rivers, he just showed that
he didn’t know rivers. I sit
by the same bridge and weir fall

downstream from the flat glass aspect
and watch bubbles pour in the kinds,
genres, types and variations
that this same river holds within.

But of course Heraclitus made
a deeper point, that nothing is,
in the sense that words falsify,
and concepts are just one type of

object we wave around like a
loaded gun, violently and
it makes us feel somewhat safer,
the way that leaping off the edge

is better than falling when you
know you have to go either way.
I bought a wrap today, the same
wrap I buy as the sun decays,

and yet it is always different.
The same and the other exist
in an old war – sometimes bombs are
dropped and everything always changes

Another Waterfall Poem From Last Year

3, 6×6, Waterfall

I got a cold last night
crept up on, I crumbled
fell in hot and coldness
under the sheets – time crawled
now, I sit on the wall
and watch the first lacewing

The light – diffused through cloud
low, heavy, though not damp –
stutters off its wings, fast
so it looks, to ill mind
and its machinations
to flutter in and out

of existence, an x
drifting from stone, to flow
blinking. Variables
sparking from the lack-dark
of a barely there head
and crackling eye-nerve knots