The Future is Sleep

The future is made of sleep. Soft cold set, stuff of drip down cloud effect, bottle body drowsy, chimed with silence, doused with absence. The future is made of the past – dropping into moment after moment. We will make no money, will take empty, flit high but lay low. Don’t tell me this is work – I saw her stiff and not asleep, her face the rigid calm of not being there and lying down on the cypress after her family sang all night for three nights and the monks had taken their robes and incense. We send kites into the sky, we send paper cranes into the river, we send poems into the void of technological advances, we send ourselves into unknown sleep, so deep it pays no dividends.

Dog For Caitlin

Dog For Caitlin

That summer we loved a small black dog

Whose eyes always seemed to

see beyond the immediate –

moving her neck from our stroking

To examine the future-hazed distance.

She lay by the door, always found the shaded places,

the tunnel through the honeysuckle, the trough

under the verandah where coolness pooled

musty, in the old dairy dark.

She would come when we called,

out into the light, her eyes half-closed

her muzzled dusted

and she would let us stroke

– with our sticky child’s hands –

her earth-cooled fur.

245 days

The air is tangled

all around her

filaments in and out

of these breaths I count

the snug of her

against my side

warm that’s mine

but now her’s.

How can I know her

and not – ?

those days she spent

gathering herself from me

in and out with the

bloodflow

up and down of the two hearts

rubbing rubbing

chaffing life up.

As if this face has always

been with me

and is more my own

than the mirror or window’s

bright fleck of person.

But only this short time

the sleep of her

so enormous.

a

Leaking

As the sky leaks

so will you

a minute apocalypse

of fluid

once seemed to be yours then falls

and you find yourself outside yourself

exacting callous flow

from time to time.

He cannot change this

small wonder

that leached your bones’ own filaments

the fine lines of marrow

borrowed

from the sun or some explosion

in the sky

where all this seems to start

and end.

You see yourself

as structured from surroundings

like birds

who weather

wear the sky from claw to beak

themselves a drop of yolk

sunset pinched to yellow

the salt blue of that fellow

how the clotted bloodstream

twisted up with iron and elements

whose very names – nitrogen oxygen hydrogen –

are foreign outsiders marching

on time’s own order

not soldiers of the self

that pulled me from you and then on again

file after file

in a library of clouds.

Some days you are the sky’s

immense sadness

that speaks up and is surrendered to

blood cord taught

that ends all ends

and will conclude…

Dog II

The river has a hollow in it

where you would have fitted

four footed leap plunge

the spring of you

the coil of that pulsing good-will body

full of joy’s vibrations

intent on the moment

as if every passing one was a smell too rich

not to contemplate

the airborne seconds

the water’s thick arms all over your fur

and how you threw it back

off your coat when it let you go.

 

Sometimes you shadow me

are so close – those times we nosed

one after the other

over the sand sky water

the sweep of your tail an extension of my arm

you a blur in my eyeline

a flash of brightness shimmering

or sleeping all purry soft

the grass smell of your paw pads

the easy heave of your breath.

 

Clock

I came to hate that clock

its stiff hands chronicled grief

and all its ticking days

held steady up the time

each one of you died.

 

I dream of that house

the wax flowers on the door step

the rows of bricks that

were the formal entrance

on the shady side.

 

I dream you have installed

an impossible aquarium

where huge faceless fish

idle in the clarity and swim

their speckled bodies against the glass.

 

The solid gold of the inner workings

don’t hold back all this changing

from metronome to monotone

that dark peculiar portrait

haunting the hall.

 

I came to hate that clock

that percussed breakfast

laundry, the bringing in of

bright jewelled tomatoes from the sun

and patience on the flecked laminex.

 

 

 

Black Hen

I must have believed that soupy death

all dark and dreamy with the precision of night

the cut blade of infinite was not for you.

 

Your feathers dusted up a grief I couldn’t place

in my child world right and wrongness.

The bite mark in your back was enough to let you go by.

 

I remember thinking spinach might save you:

these feathers so dark they were green in the dim cave.

I kept you alive for days, then death swallowed you,

 

much as my dog had wished to, when he bit down

through plumage and bone; the damage was done –

but I had to test if love could hold you

 

much in the way I saved selected snails,

spent tenderness on earthworms you – hen – would happily have turned

into part of you.  Your reflective eyes.

We put you here

With the seashell wash wave there

swimming bones

all the small ones with names like carpals, sesamoid, phalanges

can at last intertwine and rest there mistaken for fish spine

among the debris of the ocean’s sigh.

 

I remember you with that strange spongey swimming cap

in white flotsam feet up longing out your body to the sea’s

in and out green and glassy

clean like eyes and wild like hair.

 

When they come to pick over my life like gulls

(scaphoid, lunate, triquetral, pisiform)

can they see in every reflected surface

how we would laugh together and pass it from wave to wave

until we surfed them home?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tunnel

Core flutter

something was about to change

my heels as light as magnolia petals, as see through

(i have been reading too much Didion

leafing through the book of possibilities)

the oxygen in this room proliferates indelibly

something in the way he slid down next to me

slipped into my wrinkled mind

slept there for a night or two

as Hemingway or someone from long ago

magical thinking has dream-warped time.

(I have been reading too much poetry

and talking to myself at the washing line)

as if I could lather my mind and this would be gone

like a stain, like a lack of stretch or self awareness

that sees a blank in others, this birdcall at dusk

that will never be repeated.

I count my footfalls now and don’t trust the simple

time flow charts. Things can pivot in a second.

I write to see what I think

and throw it into the wind’s jaws.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pawprint Imprint

 

You will not be at the door

and maybe never wait for me again

by the road or on the tiles.

Night walks to look at the moon

or smell those passing scents

as the street quietens, are over.

Now, you have gone home, forever,

away from us and our loud songs

of love and fear and frustration.

But there is s small song I will always sing

my pawprint imprint

under the skin.