Ion
Light itself is a chapel
an east-west wash
spilt on the Christmas rose.
Space itself is a chapel
a fruitless bowl
flowers dried in a jug.
Life itself is a chapel
at water’s edge
murmur of patient prayer.
Feature Image: Saint Enodoc Church, Trebetherick, Cornwall, U.K.
Discovery
Discovery are coloured dark deep red.
I heard one falling as I brushed the tree —
a startled bird troubling bushy leaves —
but with more plummet, accelerated
power, crimson sinker parting waves of green,
descending progeny, seeds sheathed in a cream
flesh, webs of genes cradling what could be,
bound for the food waste bin, sequence
on sequence of supercoiled code unread.
But another journey took place instead
ascent through sound, to ears, into words
as you can almost taste that zingy first
apple of the season, sharp on your tongue,
sweet on your lips, parted and showing crimson.
Lovely Dead
If I were to let you go
who would I show this garden to;
who would be there to tell me ‘no’
it’s not enough to say it’s blue
in June, when echiums greet the bees
(just as later they give finches seeds)
and turns yellow in summer sun,
burns to red with heleniums
in autumn. I leave their raw
shaggy stems all through winter now —
food and shelter for birds and mice,
hope and remembering too — but more
for the texture they bring to cold light;
though to say it’s not enough, I know.
Holy Hay
I didn’t have a chance to show you
the sainfoin I sowed back in May,
remembering our holiday in Spain
where we kept seeing it in bloom
by the road and on waste ground, covering
whole hillsides, great cerise stains
of what we later learned was Holy Hay.
Back here I bought some and spread it, watching
as seedlings appeared, unfurled nodding leaflets
in the rough and roguing wind and rain.
Maybe it was the wet, or the rabbits;
whatever, just one made it through to flower,
when each closed and softly bristled brush became
a clump of rosy Jagger lips. Yet I remember
wrongly: it wasn’t Spain, it was Sicily,
and maybe what we saw was Sulla,
Italian sainfoin, a deeper red colour,
but its name would never stick with me;
not like Holy Hay, coumarin still drifting
from an early mowing, with vetch and clovers,
sweet vernal grass, sown by an unseen other
who disappeared with the passing spring.
That’s why I tried it in our garden,
feeling it somehow sacred, so it might recover
the past; seeing it there you would laugh and
I would find in that perennial trait
passed down from your dear, faithful father
a way back to those fertile fields of grace.
Feature Image: Flowers of Hedysarum coronarium at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris
All is Number
If the late afternoon light is beautiful
but God’s not behind it
then my mind is just classifying;
if the late afternoon light is beautiful
and God designed it,
it’s a blessing and a deep unknowable well:
light seems a word beyond metaphor —
a wave and a particle
neither wave nor particle,
energy cast out of the sun,
passed through a vacuum —
so vast in its power
the plump earth greens luminous
and humans agree terms to barter for
what’s there which lies shimmering
and only calculable.
Psalm
The light and the wind on the water these wild winter days are breath of it
The cardinal sun below cumulus flaring up skybeams a pulse
Gathers the gloom but high in the east celestial moon unhides behind heart-racing clouds
All in the arms of physics and this is heaven we are blessed to happen in
Feature Image: Daniele Idini
Waking Up
He had thousands of kodachromes
when he died. Nowadays they’d be snaps
stored on the cloud, given back
tritely as memories by some iphone.
Anyway, they went in the bin,
regardless of what they meant to him.
I have chameleon words, collections of notes,
playing the same role: tie it down —
capture it. What? You, me, the sound
it makes to live; not bringing old stuff close
again (that was bad enough back then),
but the dazzle of being able to comprehend.
Of course, insects don’t waste being alive
worrying about themselves;
they continue to batter themselves
against windows, the life of the hive
before their own; or fanatically nest
under stones, enslaving aphids and the rest.
And rabbits are the same, chewing and getting rattled.
All have better things to countenance
than their own permanance.
It’s baffling that we are so saddled,
knocked over by the whole picture.
What it says in the Scripture
at the start — about Adam and Eve:
it’s not really about sex and so on;
it’s about seeing yourself, alone.
Waking up. To what you may believe.
April Light
I’ve let the world of people go
in favour of growing
spring evenings,
what all the buds know,
the jonquils and the willow,
the prattling birds,
water chasing water to river,
fold of showers.
What sage said April is the cruellest month,
the year’s promise
in its tall shadows?
Let the world of people go.
Last Breath of Leaves
Cup a pear, hear it abscise,
number the days until ripe;
the river chuckles with swollen pride –
back to a ditch by six,
drained away to the scaly, selfish sea.
At dawn there’s steam across the water,
a cloud of egrets scuds over;
old and waiting, mud for water,
leaves for a last breath
of wind, tremor, helical free fall –
after life, lope and leap
to nattering heaps; then left
to turn to mull, down horizons sift,
forgotten shades of ochre,
lignin nets over rheumy, russet stones.
Fish the shilletts from their dark homes
in the deep, brown ocean;
grateful, cosseting crumbs swirl in,
close and ready for roots:
succouring limbs of bulb, corm, meristem.
Here my mulling days are numbered,
pride in appearance doomed;
hares teem across the water,
while clouds of regrets scud over;
for I am old and loping after life.
Leaf-ladder to the Sky
Dusk drums down the harbour,
Seagull sirens sound alarms,
A quiet motor sings;
Shards of mingling words slip away
Where huddled houses hug the bay;
A fish flops on the scalloped sea,
Ripples spreadly ring,
Ring, and ring, diminishing, to me:
Here are all enchantments reined,
Stowed within this compassed, solitary brain,
Haven to the slopes of coastal trees
Quiffed by parching westerlies;
Also, yellow leontodon,
Speckled on banks like sodium stars,
Where dreadlocked gorse gives way to grass;
Sheep-clipped sward; sun-lidded eyes; Doppler flies;
Various winds playing on and on,
While brambles leaf-ladder to the sky:
Here are all enchantments lain,
Meaningless, but marvellous, just the same.
Half-moon, bling of eventide
Hauls on saps which flow in time
To an ancient pulse;
Wyrt and weed together hear
The chuckle of the inner sphere;
Clackery of wind in rigging
Sees strait waters salsa,
Slap; soon sea-swells serry unforgiving:
Here are all enchantments made;
Out there, the consequences born, and paid.
Roses like suns arise and grow
Across the ramshackle brow;
A heavy scent
Swallows on the drooping air,
Is gone, recalled as summer
In the addled world behind,
Where wishes, sentiment
And bamboozling nature recombine;
Hence are all enchantments lulls,
Hummed by puzzled gardeners of the skull.
Featured Image: Daniele Idini