Older Bones

Pack-needle ribs, now 
a filigree skull: 
the pitted trowel,
your halt fingers.

Revelations

What an ingrate! Reincarnate

suffering in a desert state!

Barmy am I, sainted friend?

I am not the one to wend

My Way to Patmos site, nor climb

up cliffs to sit there, stare, and rhyme

a dotty ditty on the Holy

Book of See-It-All.  I'm solely

into sifting sand between My Toes

when I'm on vac. Look, there it goes!

Whoopsa! Wheeee!  I have more fun

building My Castles in the sun.

Now, who but you could say that's mad?

D'you really think, my haloed cad,

that I’m, like you, a Silly Sod?

Be careful, John,

Your Better,

God

Looking up

The mountains are sharp in clear air,

angles simple in snow above the valley’s 

folded fields, their contours gone

under layers laid on by routine storms.

Your daughter screams unshawled

in my strange arms, her face

a mess of tears and creases

older than we are now.

Her anger is mobile, jagged

around the room, as jutting

uplands beyond her temper

their mantled view.

Battersea Fields

Do not forget me, Battersea fields,

in the park where grass

was ankle high and seed heads

crushed in the hand

sweetened the morning air

heavy with fat smells

from candle works,

where each green blade

seemed softer under fingers

than fine lawns did years on

at the north end of the staling city.

Do not forget me, Battersea streets,

whose gutters were cobbled,

grouted with gravel, dust

where summer-sole shoes

curved over their hunch, bent

unsteady ankles as mud

from the ‘mere slipped underfoot

and matchbox boats in rain

swirled slowly by sweet wrappers

down drains through whose wide grids

slopped childhood lives.

So, I can turn to the place

where, if I am not wiser now,

I still feel strong,

the last of your grass in my hands,

your cobbles under my feet.

Tailor Made

Crippled,

fire-watching over England,

dark hours lost at the top

of a cold station, my father

crept home with the dawn,

dull eyes pink-rimmed,

to the bespoke ahead of him,

stretching a collar smooth,

neat-stitched without,

raw canvas within.

Death in Samarkand

Your star’s fixed firm in subtle skies

over the orderly Registan, square

in its maidan; mosque and madrassa ripple

their domes under a cut moon.

Out in the shelter of midnight’s observatory,

your sextant, embedded supple in marble,

measures the sharp shaft from its arc

into the niched matrix of night,

Ulugh Beg.

You pin it down with the gazer’s art,

but decline the empire left to your care,

the son shut out, his fate inclined

to your Hajj and the hunt. And you still commune

with those points in space the Zij-i Sultani

captures. A blood-gout will garble

what’s left when their sparkle is dark, faint

on the page. Your last dawn’s in flight,

Ulugh Beg,

as you fall slant between column and table

of that caught heaven you scribe. Now blink

its blaze from the end of your irritant day,

for no armillary sphere will enable

your sure ascension from life at the brink

as your sun rushes away, away.  

                                                

Snow at Easter

The city’s held in a shiver of snow.

Two days back, daffodils

bounced in a spring wind;

now they are blasted and black.

Venus and Mars unpair

on this crisp night of a moon-thin,

silver dropped behind lumps of cloud

heavy on house tops:

we hold beneath weight,

resentment a yard ahead,

all light out.

She moves beyond

our stand, rising and dipping

with the year’s jarred cycle,

missing the merging

of shoot and snow and star

while the stretched web quivers.