A Year

One year.

Three hundred and sixty five days as decreed by the Julian calendar.
The Gregorian calendar says it’s a few hours different.
In ancient times we lived by the moon; watched for North,
aligning our open eye to the up-ended rock; the other squeezed shut.

Ptolemy had a good crack at getting it right, unaware
that Hipparchus had already done it in 150 B.C.
When somebody whispered it in his ear he threw his scrolls
into a lake.  Sulked, blamed the moon for life’s unfairness.

My year is marked by the day your heart succumbed to the strain
put on it; stopped squeezing the blood around your body
and gave one last muscular shrug.  Three hundred and sixty four days
later I stand by your grave and watch three blackbirds fighting.

How easily she leaves the house;

The windows glow amber on the cliff top.

On the beach she palm-cradles pebbles;
[not the imagined :chink: but something altogether more]
tumbling fistfuls watch and wait.

She is pieced together: some other limbs
hinged from some other spinestack,
a rickety puppet performing to fog

whose paleness blows in across the salt marsh;
a brackish and cloaking relief, softly
cloaking her powdering bones, her blunted mind.

Seaweeds wrap skirts round her hips,
round her silver-lined belly,
tightly binding her heavy hands.

The oystercatcher sieves memories from salty shallows.
An SOS lined neatly in stones
and a sea so flat and wide as to still her blood.

---

Desert

 

That you have crumbled to a sharp-edged dust
that rasps my ageing skin
at every move
is a gut-churning relief.
Everything goes bad
kissed prince.

Before, you lurked,
fat and cold,
a clasping clammy clot of blinking slime
oozing through lie-lined veins
choking me drowning me.

I am crumbled down dust,
mica mixed and nameless
in this safe, unquenchable wilderness,
once swamped
by your love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

27.09.2011

ebby.

Brindled,

ears flipped inside out
for better hearing the wind
as it flattened rosettes in your hair,
lids lowered to better focus on an unseen squirrel.
The fathomless weight of your glance
settles heavily in memories,
lopes through dreams.

.

.