book and leaf

book and leaf

‘Story leaf’ by the Weathercats in winter sun

those
afternoons
i’d take
a swag
of books
out there
under one
of the trees
in the
yard
peach
plum
nectarine
apple
open a book
under the leaves
bobbing with shadow
fresh or late
green crinkled
with spreading brown
like the back of my
father’s hand

read on
in the mist
of words
rising in the
quiet the far
mountains
of northern
lands above
it

look up in
one moment
one moment
like a stick
holding in the
stream gone
under again

gap

gap

‘Before the sun’ as snatched by the Weathercats.

after the
streetlights
blink off
at last
the
remnant
dawn
left to itself
you know the
fade in
of sky
finding
ground
in you

for a few
minutes
you know
the true
fresh look
of the
road
hedges

Black Finn’s son abed

Black Finn’s son abed
in his delirium mortis he recalled the old laments & saw such visions of calamity beyond his ken to grasp

‘The Great Day of His Wrath’ by John Martin, c.1853

‘might be your last..’,
the base note our songs
returned to, dusk at
the foot of the piano,
avalanche of snow
soft as moths that
din on glass
yet wipes the face
of mountain clean

our oldest songs began
from this note, they widened
from it like the rippling gap
between hull and wharf
as the boat puts out to a sea
it shall not return from,
the note the gull cries above
the leaving tide, fish heads on
stalks of spine the fisherman
has left to rot on the shore.

had we forgotten the descent
of its harmonies, its rhyming
round the grave, the time is yet
again we shall embark on its
outward breath without rehearsal,