Mustard Seeds

In hills of corn
you three splash.
Waves of grain
pour over each other.
You fly with swallows
while metaphors lie incomplete
beneath the wreckage of your feet.

In your shoes and pockets;
the grains of the words
your mother will say
when I take you back
limping and laughing.

Tomorrow; nailed by my own
unforgiven words and deeds
they’ll crucify me for you.
Pour vinegar
on our monthly communion.
Spear my sides with smears.
Knowing today’s seeds
shall struggle to grow tall
I stuff them in pockets,
down socks, and wrap
my long coat around yous
for the rain has began.

Surfaces

It was you, in clouds of breath last night,
glass cold to the touch;
swans in headlight beams and shafts of dark.

Clearly there is a surface. Below
absurd webbed feet trundle and
crazed fish eyes glare and dart
one beat from beaks and birds’ eyes narrowing

for those lie-in-wait-predators-Pike
who hover over eels and leeches
hidden by the mire that settled.

On a glance you’d think nothing disturbing

these five used cars since you left

I’ve silenced the songs or moved them.
I’ve read poems into fragments.
I’ve sought your skin in softer others.
I’ve hung you in the darkness of your hair.
I’ve launched your smile to the moon

and, with dust, all these things I’ve sprinkled
and flooded with other women’s waters
and laid down a surface by my hardness
and surfed it with beauty and sex.

It is you last night in my car.
I leaned and kissed you.
Hey Presto – we still fitted – Pandora’s box -
things flurried and burst out the dust
heading for the surface.
We pushed gasping air between us
glad to be still floating. Apart.
In the rain-pocked windscreen
a million swans moved over the surface
repeating in every tear-like lens.

The day the Crow came

I’m with the snowman
dancing in powdered circles.
My wings are full out
though my feet are ice.

Then; on great heights
of stretched neck skin
and wide eyes,
black as a bastard,
a Crow flies.

The snow turns pavements hard
and he lands in his own cawing
peeling his eyes like a dolls.
(There are always Crows in Winter
and silent Christmas dolls.)

That’s the moment he arrived.
How cold the garden,
how wide, how long
the streets, how hard.

And a man
who might be my father
comes slipping on the ice.

I screamed the long path
to my mother, stunned in the doorway
cutting a potato and her hand.

The cylinder

Imagine a cylinder.
You are inside;
honey-scented tobacco
burning by your Uncles chair.

This is a slower world
of pinks and ochres,
of joys and certain comforts.
Outside, a storm.
Stitches of rain hem you in.

Aunt is lino-shuffling
to a kettle started whistling.
The rustle of biscuits.
The scratching of birds in the loft.
Uncle gently snoring.
And another sound;

Two drops of wallpaper come apart.
The cylinder seam splits.

A frightening gap.

A hinge creaks behind you.
You grab onto the chair
as the cylinder gapes and springs

flinging you to a world wide and waiting,
snapping shut on Uncle stuffing his pipe
and Aunt pouring endless water to
a pre-heated teapot.

Macrahanish Beach

When I was young
I fell asleep
Drunk on Macrahanish beach.

I told everybody it was beautiful
Just so I could say Macrahanish.

Mac ra ha nish

But I was young
And I was drunk
And I didn’t give two fucks for beauty.

For beauty is an old man’s thing.

Holding sand to fall
And projecting sorrow –
Which in itself is beauty –
Onto these disappearing grains.

And disappearing is the perfect word
For the sand falling from my palms.

Dis a ppea ring

It sounds like sand falling on sand
And feels like the coming of the end.
And tonight
Fifty years later
On Macrahanish beach
The ocean is out there
And

it

is

Beautiful.