blue night

blue night
to the paintings of Juan Miro
greenlane rd, february 1989, edited november 2022

Juan Miro – ‘Teaching’

the stars are
full on the
air this night.
fanned to the
point they hint
and retract at
the eye’s
softness.

i’ve eked out
whatever heart
i’ve taken
to build a
sense of house
decorated, so well
known from within
like these backyards
dug around with
bush, sapling,
flowering vine to
outgrow the gaps
stood between
planks stapled
against the rise,
this night
a dark upon
dark leafage the

where i am

where i am

‘Chalk circle’ by Andrew Eglinton with acknowledgements

looking back a few days
it could be years
laying hold of the sky
in image a stone
cut blue across
a whiteness under
the face            noon
that points within
once i opened hours
stroked the bird that
gusts away an autumn
old i lay string around
that circle knew it
in that circle was in
that circle

Chieko

*Chieko’s sky

Chieko with her husband Kotaro.

i saw a film about her once, Chieko,
married to the famous japanese sculptor
a poet too who could write strong things
in the worst of times, i don’t know
if Chieko could.
she was mad, mad the way the mad are
who have to do too much living in
one head one heart her name alone was
enough for me to love.
she had a line in her husband’s poem
someone read on the sound track,
and there was sky in that shot
a scratchy blue and Chieko laughing
on a hill with him.
in the poem he wrote how she
insisted, knowing too well that
‘the sky over Tokyo
is not the real sky.’
it took me nineteen years to understand