| ROPE This long rope my friend
we found lying on the sand
as we entered the beach,
I caught it in my hand, you in your teeth,
and we ran with it.
Your shaking it, your frenzy,
your growling while you pulled
and tried to thrash it in the air
was a joy that trod along,
I am still seeing the length of it
behind us hissing and the line on the sand
zigzagging behind and the jagged
waves spreading down
and skirting its trail.
Its rough texture of knots is still
itching on the palm of my hand,
my skin hot and tingling with salt.
A bright touch, a bright pain,
Heaven’s conspicuousness,
what we would never drop. And in my breath
my hand is still pulling now. And you on the chair, your eyes
still urging me on.
SAILS There’s a cluster of them on the horizon,
neat triangles in the haze,
you think of children on the pier,
elbowing one another, ready to take the plunge,
but they look very still, not like children,
tall priests rather, scrutinizing the blue silence,
clad in white, in order to retain all the fingertips of light,
a gathering of the elders on the thin edge,
consulting each other with solemn persistency
about the state of the unknown.
HERE AND NOW Eddie is sitting the exam,
he has just started answering questions,
there’s that well-known, quivering
thin sun in the string of his voice,
he has just finished sitting Art, it’s my turn now,
well, neat, concise sentences, he’s ok,
he shifts to the others along the long
sand-coloured table, the Art colleague
whispers to me something about the sky
- a Constable sky outside, look- she says, to pass the time,
I see the swollen, swept-by clouds in the blue
but I am thinking about how late
it is after all these hours of exams,
after waiting, glancing, nodding,
in this long and narrow Now
while Eddie gets to a standstill
unable to explain a Maths formula,
pen in mid-air, a glassy, tense
sheen in his eyes, a pit, a ravine
that hurts better to go on- we say to him,
to Latin, quick, -don’t worry now-
while a janitor comes in and whispers something
in the Art colleague’s ear, she becomes
dark in the face and says
that her old mother has just fallen at home
down the stairs, she has managed
to get to bed, they have told her
not to move and wait for help,
in the meantime Eddie is answering
about Carthage and Dido’s love,
I see sand on African shores
and wind sweeping the Constable clouds
with the pulse of the
dead worried colleague, her heart
here and not here and the grip of all that ticks in the instants,
time’s irises and a pen still in mid-air,
time’s stare I don’t want to feel detached from
and whose quicksilver glare has always,
in spite of its impending pain,
already embraced and overtaken me.
WINTER TREES Through them
the naked line of the horizon.
What will remain
after the flourishes of your heart and mind.
They can reveal
life in its inner pattern, with tendrils
of smoky grey and mauve shades transpiring,
the memory of blood, the still
streaming trails of your will glowing. On the garlands of the islands
they frame the stage for the cormorants,
for the straight lines of their flights
that brush the water-skin
and your breath,
wings beating in rhythmic frenzy,
resolution dashing off
in its native hue. Keep your gaze still
on a sky filled
with these few brushstrokes,
on days of bright dusks
and flowering pencilled lines,
your eyes will be gently sandblasted
by heaven’s essentials, their X-rays pulsing
through the ashes of your wish.
WHAT AFTER There’s an unfathomable stare in this sea you love
and a simplicity that makes you hardly raise your eyes,
the gulls’ cries in the silvery rainy day,
the quietness without wind,
an immobility and a wait,
an unconcerned determination
in the roar on shore
and in the horizon’s bareness.
After the bustle of your last battle
how many other lives would you need
to stick to the unknown
unmeasurable ”what after”?
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