Combustion

The combustion engine shakes and mumbles,

A thousand tiny parts touching and retracting

As the wheels spin and the dust circles up

Before settling down

As the vehicle is moving along.

The window is open and the air

Presses loudly through the gap,

The rabbits have scattered and are gone

Leaving their droppings on the side of the road

And the silhouette of a moose might be guessed at

But no more, the play of shadows is ethereal

But the shadows after all created by something material.

,

Every single piston breathes and wheezes

And pushes and pulls and acts,

Each leaf of grass hides an ant.

The foliage obscures the birds

But they’re there, wings folded and

Eyes twinkling and neck darting, ready to leap,

And the seat does not meekly receive the body,

But conducts the shock of every stone,

Every pit up into the spine

That is itself buzzing with electricity

To keep the legs moving to keep

The combustion engine shaking.

,

And the cows that have stared in mute terror

At the butcher’s, and the millions

Of years that created long

Hydrocarbon

Chains out of the fluttering wings of a nervous

Orange butterfly, and the hydrogen fusion

Creating sunlight, creating warmth

Here

In the forest, on the road and in the car.

And a vision of the sun as a star

In distant, distant galaxies

Twinkling.

Eyelids

As I press my fingers into my closed eyes

I tense, hold my breath in my chest

And with eyes closed I focus on

Two sets of images, one – flashes of

Light and fog and patterns that fade and flex,

Skulls perhaps float past the inside of

My eyelids, so I press down harder

And the cranium collapses into stars.

,

The other set of images is exteriors,

Expressions and clothes, the red hat of an octogenarian

In a black coat,

The flash in the eyes of a girl as she curls her knees

Towards her chest, her body for a moment a seashell,

The stretching curve of a bridge

A cat in dusty indoors sunshine,

Fingers obscuring closed eyes,

My back a limp arch.

Phantoms

If I had been a ghost

(these are dangerous thoughts)

I would wear a pee-stained sheet

And cry crocodile tears

And steal ice cream from street vendors.

I would race the escaping helium balloons

And stare down kittens

And steal diapers from the elderly.

If I had been a ghost

(goes my fantasy)

I would come to you late at night

And be your blanket and tell you that everything

Is all right in the end.

Thunder

Think of Thor before you hear thunder,

Fill the silence after the flash

With mead and dance and laughter,

Blood-vows and bellows and pain in your shoulder

As it is twisted out of joint,

Fill it with hugs and tears and the smell of

Comrades and women and girls,

In the aftermath of the sharply angled brilliance

Envision the curves and sinews of firm muscles

Suspended in movement

And pearls of salt sweat down the small of your back.

But even more,

Thor of the Thunders,

Who lost his hammer in the underworld

And dressed like fair Frey, in lace

And frills and a bridal veil

Barely containing the bushy beard,

In order to get his manly weapon back.

Think of a God in woman’s clothing

After your teeth glisten with lightning

And before your marrow is displaced by thunder.

The Land Between

“O my land,

O my people,”

For I, who have neither land nor people

And live on the ragged arc of light between the nations,

Whose breath draws in the soda pop fizzle of the static,

And that only:

Let the bell-chimes of the pastures wash over me

Let the warmth of coffee-cups in December

Seep through my gloves.

For I, who reach towards the heart –

And find but smoke and mirrors

And the empty click of days spent apart –

Nothing!

,

Nothing eases the mind of one who wants to be consoled

About the lack of ease of mind,

“O,” my pathos

Cannot be grounded in solid earth, cannot be supported by the firmament,

O my grief cannot breathe nor be born,

But for the snap of the light on the screen,

In the towers, in the air and in the corn.

O my land, beneath and beyond and between,

O my people.

Intricacy

A richly decorated Roman column, repainted in -95,

Having weathered one millennium eight centuries

Let it speed back through time.

The paint ripping itself loose and contracting

Into flowers into earth and a million

Parts of a million lives and the water

Circulating so fast it appears to be

Standing still.

And the stone jumping into the soil

And drawing a single deep breath

And diving down

Towards the heat, not really separate

From the vast layers of pure rock everywhere

But swimming nonetheless beneath

The crust faster and faster and then

Reaching the heart and melting

Then the unfathomable state of being melted.

Then reverse the reversation

And twist spin dance world

Ever unchanging change uncapturable by constants

Suddenly

A column.

Unscientific Apocalyptic Vision

I

Mirror-black reflection rising

Over the pebble-ladened beach,

Trickling into tiny streams,

Following the country roads,

Covering the country roads,

Brown bark slowly submerged

Under starkly silent creeping seas.

Kids jumping from the third floor,

The large splash spraying the lamp-post

With salt, then silence.

Climb up on your desk, claw

Against the ceiling, drown.

The shapes sinking through the water, down,

Finding the asphalt with an echoing sound

– Nothing there, flow back up.

Autumn leaves following the current,

Colourful confetti mingling with the herring,

Whales smash into the store-fronts,

And the antennas peer up over the

Surface, staring towards empty skies.

,

II

And after the wetness, dryness,

The limp crackle of dust on

An undisturbed surface with uneven hills

And broken crags of brown rust

That welcome nobody but the breeze and the gust.

And then the scuttle of tiny feet

Returning after the long retreat.

Impressionable

Kafka once said that the greatest man is he

Who inflicts more damage on the world than the world

Inflicts on him. So it may be,

And in this case the sail of history has unfurled

,

In such a way that there are no more great men left.

As our thoughts around some idea lie curled,

We are really doing nothing but commiting the theft

And destruction of a concept that has been hurled

,

At our mind by chance. And we are bereft

Of independence, our skin is too thin,

The unrelenting avalanche has left our skull cleft,

And we cannot help but commit the sin

,

Of not being ourselves but merely a second-rate screen

On which the nerves of, say, Eliot patter and preen.