Will you remember me
In Spring
When warmth draws leaves
To your branches
And sweat to my body while I walk
Toward another hopeful Summer,
Wishing heat?

I was there - when
Winter made you
To sleep
And frost settled early in night -
Singing a lament to my gods
Because there was no one else
To recall
Those subtle energies sucked
By your roots from Earth:

Only a cloud, its transient face
A smile,
Thanked me for my song
Until the birds of sunset spoke
There where cattle grazed and waited
For their death around your almost
Earth-touching boughs
And a river flowed as river flows
Cutting time between banks
And measuring four centuries
For your girth.

So soon, her love was gone
And I was again as I often am
Alone to seek my gods
Since my words and my living in my head
Made me to her a stranger, mad

Will you remember them, you who once,
Many times, saw the sky comet-white at night,
You who stood, quietly, waiting,
For another one to hear again
Your song?

When will the sharpness be to sever me
To fall as all others here have fallen, dead?

Each oak is a Sign
 

There is a simplicity in love
To help solve those difficult equations we impose
Upon our own problems of life:

There is nothing complicated about joy -
It is only an appreciation which takes us far beyond
The beginnings of our self
When we who still desired strove mightily
Against all other desires and our own.

Had we stopped, sat even, for moments, still,
We might have seen the clouds
Shape-changed by wind
As they passed above
There where even our street-hardened desire
Could not go.

But we had to fight to prosper to live
And only in passion did we glimpse in moments a beauty
Beyond -
As when, satiated within our lover's arms,
Our being relaxed to journey in defiance of our life
To where some gods were born
While rain played as rain played upon those panes of glass
And a Church clock tolled its ten amid the morning city noise
In her Apartment
When we who waited warm in bed should long ago
Have been upon our way to work.

All religions were born from such answers
Before we lost the Vision in the words:
Each day we need to try to remember the questions
That brought such beauty
Perhaps once only
To our treasured space on Earth:

But can just one poem give just one waiting killer
Just one vision of a wider reality of life?
 

Silence
Such peace I thought not possible
Upon my darkened Earth:
If I have need to answer the anger
Which is mine, I choose this stone
Worked, fallen and worked again
Until in sun it stands
Folly to my wise man's jest
That held so many with laughter.

If I have need to answer the violence
Which was mine I choose this silence
That speaks so eloquently of love:

It is ours, ours alone
When we cease.

There is sorrow, growing as the cumulus grows,
Threatening a summer storm
Just as there is the ineffable silence of sadness, within:
And I have, again, the knowing of how little I know
And just how great is my blame.

For she who for seven years past
Loved, tolerated, this fool
Stays
While I walked with my heavy sack of clothes
To travel to where a friend's floor is rest
While the humid night turns, ever more slowly, to day.

And there cannot be a return to our house the home, the life, the sharing
Of our dreams born of her toiling love
While I, forgetful, self-absored, stumbled ever more foolishly on.
So I must remain, here, or more probably there which is somewhere, new.

I have not learnt, as I did not remember the pains,
The tears, the pledges of a past of partings and death: I have no excuse
And will need to endure as the bird, wings downturned, endured
The early morning storm
That soaked its tree and made the village brook to rush upward
To almost overflowing as I once, many times, overflowed in the days
Of our sharing before my selfish darkness creepingly darkened our joy.

No sun, now, to close my eyes in sleep as I lay upon a grassy bank
While threshing water threshes over stones, stilling
Both sentiment and thought;
No: no sun, no warmth, only clouds, darkening, covering, making me to walk
With my dried tears along a hedgeful lane
Towards the hard, cold, penitential door.

And she, too, will be alone, dreams treacherously slain
By this sinner
 

I have loved, and in that one expression
Are memories enough to make this foolish man
Cry

Were they real, those times
When we together lay savouring
The music that filled the sun-filled room
Within a Summer's evening
Whose scent rose from our garden
To mingle between those breathless words
Of love?

Were they real, those moments
When we alone stood together
While the then unseen moon in creeping darkness
Crept higher
To spread some seeping light
Upon a rain soaked lane where I in haste
Walked, warm with anger,
Having scorned your angered
Yet anxious face?

Were they real, the insults traded
Breaking in fractured greyness the memory
Of all the wordless moments shared
As when by this river we walked
Among the snowy ice one Spring
To watch the moon: pleased and pressing
Warm bodies together as our breath
Made clouds of laughter and I
Without shame cried a music's tears?

Was it real, that symphony
That was our lives?
There was no ending, then, no scores
Complete:
Only a few bars as letters
Some themes, frozen in fading photographs.

Are they real, these words to help me
Compose the promises of life
While a red sun falls mist-slowly
Below the crimsoned cloud
And brief flames of flaming colour
Flame a dim horizon
While music plays, alone, to try and presence
Some god within our empty home?

You are gone
And I beneath moon in gibbeous silence
Wait watching for stars to stab
This darkling night
As our river clasps in coldness
Your letters and fading photographs

Here I have stopped
Because only Time goes on within my dream:
Yesterday I was awoken, again,
And she held me down
With her body warmth
Until, satisfied, I went alone
Walking
And trying to remember:

A sun in a white clouded sky
Morning dawn yellow
Sways the breath that, hot, I exhale tasting of her lips.
The water has cut, deep, into
The estuary bank
And the mallard swims against the flow -
No movement, only effort.
Nearby - the foreign ship which brought me
Is held by rusty chains
Which, one day and soon
And peeling them like its paint,
Must leave

Here I shall begin again
Because Time, at last, has stopped
Since I have remembered the dark ecstasy
Which brought that war-seeking Dream

Each Spring re-assures
Just as every cloud is re-made
By rain:
We are isolated and unique
Since every passion is only an answer
In part
When we who could be gods
Waste that precious moment of life.

Each Spring re-assures
With its warmth
And we can walk where few feet
Travel
And fewer words are born
Between rock and sky
Where Time, even Time, settles
And forgets to announce:
Only stream, moor and breeze
While seeds settle to grow,
By themselves.

Each Season brings a Cause
Where rootless rocks that are cities
Rise through the rain
And the sorrow of wisdom
Becomes brittled then broken through words:
Each Season renews
As that which lives must surely die
Leaving silence to take us like a path
To where rocks merge with moor.

Each Spring re-assures
That we the half-living
May gather ourselves in calm:
For there is nothing difficult about life
Since it is easy to learn to step
As streams step, through moor
 

Sun fades while equinoxal leaves fall
To gather, wind-strewn, on the greens
And muddy browns of Earth where trees rear up
To soften the stark brick, concrete and stone
Of a new annexe to this old but finely built campus:

I walk to try to gather peace,
Away from the beating noise
That falls from student rooms:
On stone steps a gaggle has gathered
To discuss in loud voices
And I wander to a hopefully silent Chapel.

I have no sentence of undisputed meaning
To describe the feeling
As I entered to hear the organ playing Bach:
There was no Time
No century of belonging
Only a leaving in an inward implosion
As I stood, unaware of who or what I was.

But she was real, this goddess
Who played with thin fingers
Creating in an instant a divinity
Of love
Her wraithe form almost swathed in black:
She looked up, once, as I sat astounded,
And smiled in concentration.

I, remembering
The future, the present
And the past.

I had to stay, until her music stopped
When I with silent words in rehearsal
Ventured to approach
To lead her out toward the gathering dark

Wind cannot whisper in towns:
It is condemned to wander
Twisting around the winding streets
Burdened then lost
By bustle and noise:

No one to hear the words
That are not words but feelings perplexing
In movement and sound.
No one to share the one remaining silent hour
When Dawn in Summer breaks
And no metal lice crawl noisey
Along streets -

No one, except
She who sits in a Park
Weeping softly the words of her woe:
The promise promised in youth
Is gone, broken
Like the skin of her face
By hands that are hardened hands
Calloused on life.
Long gone, the pains - but not the beatings
Of her past as the puss of memory
Suppurates to seep
To scar the vulnerable tissues
Of her dreams.

Yet she does not hear
The soft warm wisdom of the wind:
Only the footsteps, fearful,
Heading her way:

Once, as girl, she had sat
While a hot sun in a Summer's Park
Drew sweat from her sun-browned
Burgeoning body
As she dreamt her dreams of love.
But hands held suddenly her throat
And tore off her dress
While no warm wind carried
Her screams away -
He had laughed, while she cried.

There is no forgetting the pains
Of her past
And she runs to where a rotting house
Hides the burden of her husband's drunken flesh:
But there is always a Film or some book
To marry her dreams with her day.

Yet the sun breaks, still,
Although the wind cannot whisper its wisdom
In towns.

I might die on these moors:
No trains in the distant valley would stop
Just as no one would vow
Revenge.

Would it be easy, dying?
Only the cold day in Winter
Might change
Just a little
When the sun shines into blue
And white whisps of cirrus
Gather to briefly signal the change.

All that is, is balanced
Caught Like this Sunday hour
Early
When people sleep
And sun just stretches past hill.

But all hills must die, even mine,
Straddled as they are between roads
Invisible and seen
Leading to where there is a profundity of excuse
With the name of some city or some town.

But there is wisdom here
Where wind stirs great storms of snow
And a Summer sun burns the summer Men
Who leave cars to tramp
A little
While the fine weather or their humour
Lasts.

It might be difficult to die here,
With worlds still unknown.