The poems below are all from “Puzzle”, a collection of poems I wrote between 1998-2001 and produced in booklet form with a cover designed by Laura Thomson. “Transaction”, “Puzzle” and “On The Train To Basingstoke” appear in the Anthology “Heart as Origami” which was published by Rising Fire Press in August 2005. “On being a dakini” fits nowhere but won’t go away either! The poems are divided between two pages because they were too long to fit on one page…
Dora Wunbery
Perhaps it was in a bid to break free
that my mother one day took hold
of her Audrey Brown self.
She turned it inside out
and with a few quick origami folds
made herself an anagram.
Don’t ask me how.
The Daily Mail reader still held supreme –
most days.
But then, sudden as a kingfisher,
I would catch a glimpse of fleeting Dora Wunbery
at mischief. Playing words,
living the Hum of life
with a wicked laugh
before suddenly she was caught
by the scorpion-tailed conservative voter
and pulled up short by the kitestring
hurtling her back to earth.
March 1998
Hang-gliding
In loving to stand
on Portsdown Hill
she taught me.
My memories now are made
of her dandelion delight
after long mornings
of ritual housework when,
in sudden flight, she rose
on lucid thermals.
Now that I am alone,
I seek some secret message
she might have left me, embedded
in the palms of my hands,
the curve of my spine. In this
unfathomable longing to fly.
c1/4/99
Mum
Regular as clockwork
And without the embarassed hesitation of grief,
her paper landed on the doormat.
Each morning I picked it up,
knew no-one would read it
and folded it neatly by her empty chair.
March 1998
Finding Her Apron
Forgotten,
her apron held its counsel
behind the kitchen door.
Comings and goings of careworkers
saw to his needs, sanitised
traces of her as they reorganised
the kitchen.
Soft emblem of her status,
it hung there,
two pegs in the frayed pocket
since her last dash
to rescue the washing.
Breathing her presence,
I am child at her knees again,
burying my face,
trying to hold on
so that she will not go.
June 1998
Yawning Freedom
Yawning tracts
of freedom lie ahead.
The last of my roots pulled up
as he let go the tenuous grip
of his veiny hand.
I am left walking,
step by careful step
towards an unknown future,
judge and witness gone,
my anchor freed.
June 1998
The Ways of Sadness
(after Ananda)
I am learning the ways of sadness.
How it falls like a gentle darkness
once a quietness is made for it.
How it can be
a softly enfolding cloak
if I will only wear it.
I am learning its names,
how it hides and how it dances;
its masquerades and its incursions.
And as I learn, a well within me deepens
and a suddenness of joy will sometimes come,
fresh from the dark water.
20/12/98
Season of Grief
January cuts me
like an ice wind brings
the echo of your dying.
I begin my third spring
alone with the useless snowdrops
still pushing silently skywards.
February 2000
The Solitary Retreat
Three kinds of ink,
two small painboxes,
a dozen books,
three kinds of incense,
a choice of teas,
chocolate and halva,
knitting,
a radio and tape player,
two maps,
a selection of dharma talks,
a whole transcribed tape-lecture series,
a bird book,
a tin whistle
and a torch.
And here I sit,
solitary,
entertained by
the lichen on the tree,
fascinated by the sudden brightening of the sun.
September 1998
At the Margins
When I have fled
beyond all
that is reasonable
I find myself
at home
on the margins.
In that cold
is space.
In yawning terror
air enough
to breathe.
There too
small treasures
dropped
by slowing time.
That jagged stone,
a patch of moss,
these blades
of sharp,
green grass.
1/2/99
Falling Moments
Why is it that the earth becomes
more beautiful to me as I grow older?
The house sits quietly like a patient aunt
in the spaces between our games.
The iguana crawls up the wall waiting
for the music to be added to its back like technicolour scales.
I would like to stand on the bridge and look at the lights
across the darkening city with you.
I often think of the button tin spilling its bright treasures
on a spread out copy of the Daily Mirror.
It is only when I am happy that I do this.
It is not necessary that the birds sing or that the sky is blue.
The falling moments make the summer skies more precious,
the winter cold more real and the need to live right to the marrow imperative.
27/2/99
Always
I always (always,
always, always)
wanted to get close
to life. As a child
I passed long afternoons
wondering intently how
to become an antirrhinum.
How to breathe the secret
of vanilla rain falling
on window panes for a whole
day. How to lie still enough
to nuzzle up close to the
earthy moment that it might
take me for a friend
and carry me high
through the stillness and silence
over the long pass deep
into the mountain of unknowing.
10/4/99
The Rite of Fascination Comes First
Teller of dreams, did you see the sun arc that day?
The way its rays peered, incredulous, through the glass?
Did you hear that the rain gathered itself in a tightness of delight
before pouring tears of light upon the landscape?
Did you feel the shadows of your words steal away silently, and wait
in dark corners, so I could collect them and carry them home?
Did you smell the air that saved a space for us
and made out meaning from the music of our thoughts?
And did you touch the ground, as I did, and feel it there,
deep and necessary – holding calmly the moment when we met?
13/6/99
BRISTOL
Bridge from my past
Reaching now into the present
It puzzles me, the way it pulls me back.
So long ago I cried in Clifton,
Tried to leave by many desperate means.
Over the gorge, the bridge hangs in beautiful suspension.
Loving its dangerous call, I return.
22/7/99
Leaf
Above the hinge of a lakeshore
I hang solo in an orchestra
of autumn.
I have a siamese twin
I’ve never met, living
on the surface of the water.
She is light,
I, of earth.
The seasons change.
Once I rose –
tiny impulse
through sap to leaf.
She was there to greet me
and when I fall I’ll meet her
even as we part.
4/7/99 (4/10/99)
Transaction
Coming to buy eggs, you wear
the lacy hand-knit cardigan,
your camel-hair coat, good
shoes, a hat and orange lipstick.
Eighty-something and accustomed
to service, you stand waiting,
trusting the small unspoken
ritual that I will see.
I leave the till and come to help.
Choosing among the tray of eggs
as carefully as I would have chosen
for my own grandmother.
You expect no less of me.
Always, I ask how you are.
You reply evasively, politely
avoiding raw reality.
Praising your fortune,
you tell me about a brother
who drove a hundred miles
to see you, sick at Christmas.
Today, fresh back from visiting,
you say that you’ll be leaving
and how you will miss people – me
and the lady at the bank who smiles.
1/6/99 (4/10/99)
Hove Seafront – November
Gulls fade, wheeling away from me into cloud.
A flat sea heaves breaths of discontent
slap against the shore.
Mumble of shingle,
fall of rain
Endless
patience.
My favourite colours darken to the horizon.
Dirty white water trails on
sand full of seagulls
and the black teeth
of broken
breakers.
I’d like to hold this peace, this space,
this open wide afternoon of grey
November when I watched
the bleak become
beautiful.
November 1999
From a Dhanakosa Window
Thursday 7.30 am
I wanted to say
to the wind, stop
your relentless
shaking of the arms
of the young copper beech
can’t you see how it holds
onto its leaves for dear life
wet and ragged
in the morning rain
don’t you feel
its leaves will be there
so little time
they need better than this
or is it that they are
laughing and it is I
who cannot see?
June 2000
Web
A small brown spider
slung the quivering ropes
of her white web
from the seashell mobile I made,
to the driftwood bowl on the table
and out to a brown paper bag
of fabric, bought for trousers.
I worried at the investment of such labour
between three points of such uncertainty.
But it was begun. And I could only watch
the inward spiral. She climbed
from thread to thread, reached out
tiny crooked legs, twitched her body
to the side, fastened the threads.
Later, she hung still at the centre,
patient or exhausted, I supposed.
I prayed for flies, for something
as reward before the wind
or careless hands collapsed
this weightless, half seen
mesh of death and beauty
which holds my breath,
catches the light,
and out of which
the spider never falls.
July 2000
At last the light
While the pages of your Gary Larson calendar make their way to the rubbish
(except the good ones which you save like hoarded laughter)
the days go on being days
and I keep shaking them to see what I can get out.
Tangled in the safety-net of a full mind, I forget I don’t need the answer
to all the questions ever asked; the sky is always present
in puddles and the sea is there, in the glass, at the side of my bed.
I must plant a beginning deep in every moment. And bury it again,
and again and again in the darkness. Then I’ll be free to feel
the way a poem feels when as last the light falls upon its page.
August 2000
A Walking Day Kim’s Game
for Vijayasri
An adder asleep in the early morning grass as we set out.
The sun with rays right round, like a child’s drawing.
The alder that shook all its leaves in a rattly way, in a
breeze, so you knew it was an alder.
Three sunflowers peering over a tall brick wall.
That cloud with a tiny hole the sun shone through like a
magnifying glass.
The head high fields of maize.
Stumbly stubble dry cracking in the autumn sun.
Your stride. The way you rolled your trousers up.
Your eyes that have trouble making out the map.
Carrying home a newborn conker in the pocket of my turquoise silk
shorts.
Walking nine miles of twelve-bar blues.
Angora sheep with crimpled grey wool, floppy ears and tails that
stick up.
Two seabirds, heading south, black with long white heads.
A smell of brassicas in a ploughed field.
The starlings singing like a rattle of alder leaves at
Gatwick station.
How you wanted to walk all the way to the end when you heard
there was a badge.
13/9/00
i put paperclips on the loose ideas that clutter the porch
i remember how i used to think
that everyone kept the same ornaments
on the same shelves for twenty years
there is a kind of chaos that is longing for me
i catch it from the corner of my eye
then look away for the regularly placed
reassurance of streetlamps
trees shout loudly to me that they can dance
and I’m obliged to let them,
until I can muster enough imagination
to make them stop
angels and archangels soar dangerously near my ears
all kinds of secrets bubble up from drains
in a surprising syntax of sudden messages
I find myself lost
the wind makes loud invisible shapes from the torn air
and what i feel is the cold
hand of inevitability trying to push me
down the path i’d always chosen
December 2000
Walking the fruitcake beach
I stir wet shingle with the toe
of my green leather boot.
Sun shines. Waves break.
I walk a smile’s curve
back toward the clouds.
3/12/00