I will be trying out Posterous for my blogging pleasure – at least for a while.
Sorry WordPress. You’ve been great. It’s not you, it’s me. I just need some space…
Oaks grieve long in rain,
Grow glass, black slug wet, glisten.
*****
The gang of saints on Charles Bridge
Are all agog for stars. Their fingers prod up
*****
To All Saints’ Night. They wait.
We watch the heavy leaves drip
*****
Then drop from their tremendous hands.
*****
Your eyes brown fields
in which I could walk
for years and find myself stronger.
And your hands are the wings
I would search for if drowning.
Both your eyes and hands love
even when I snow myself under
and then you uncover me, carefully,
as though you loved the clearing
and the snow.
Autumn sun fails
The sky grey with whales
Lookout gulls ride out
On one stretched bicycle
Fogged men offer kites
Up to the wind
They tug up and dissolve
And become gulls
And leave their owners
Surprised by the new
Sudden ease in their hands
Just the long tensing lines
That haul out the sun
And fasten them to heaven
The drag and the heat
Of sky, its pale muscles,
And the Witness Mountains –
The way to Salföld,
A sand way through
Old Hungary in midsummer:
Dry grasses, poppies,
Unbroken lemon clouds of spiders,
And the hayfields rolled up
In stacks and left. Above
An eagle hangs it seems for hours,
A dark wand, motionless, lost in its own spell.
*
Salföld’s sea of stones -
The ancient Pannonian Sea
Left its shores of clean sand
For the wind to sift
And flag these sandstone blocks -
I read the sign and feel
The spell of history,
Its trick of orientation,
As when in a strange city
The street map becomes suddenly real,
A knowledge that you feel,
Like memory, behind the eyes.
*
Midsummer
On the silent shores
Of the Pannonian Sea,
Remembering my own
Strata, each like sunburn
On the skin, a memory of heat,
Among poppies and the singed grasses,
Myself a sand maker
On the shores,
Part of the eagle’s vision
A spell of
The sea breeze.
For your birthday
I have carted
off the flowers
(can only die
in this weather)
so my words (these
rough flowers) I
place as in a
glass, carefully
in your hands, safe,
for you touch with
petals – only
they can make glass
care, flowers laugh.
*
Winter aligns me
with the seasons, and has me remember
*
you were only a windfall that fell
accidentally here
*
steeping the morning and
the elms and the irises in the late and surprising sun -
*
all scant now under winter’s heaven
where the jays scream their love back
*
and the sun sits
on its cool hands, listening to love dry.
*
*
The startle
of morning.
*
Gulls’ wings fresh
from the mist
*
dazzle in
the sun’s wind.
*
River winds
bend willows,
*
and winded
forests lean
*
like boxers.
Winds like hands
*
raged to sculpt
these angles.
*
*
Behind an iron fence
and a lime tree
the church lemon yellow
*
The blue porch -
where the angel lifts
a ruined arm and leans
*
and stares enduringly down
as though thinking
beyond stone, below
*
to the red fresh geraniums.
*
*
Pressure of new spring air and light
The weight of walking under or through it.
*
I see in the lake the hazel twig sun
And the stirred sky
*
And the quiet electricity
Fume between the clouds.
*
You would come here to view an eclipse
The quiet wonder
*
Or to hear the songs
Blackbirds left in the trees.
*
The trees still singing -
And us still staggering.
*
