Turn the Wheel

Turn the wheel hand over hand sunlight
between too much thinking and reverse
or three point turn pointing me faced
due east October low horizon offering

to the sun the sun through windmill
blades a turning cutting spinning
that's usefully collecting electricity
Dear Ben Franklin look how far we've come

would you be reeling with it the myriad
signs of our enterprise I for one have lost
my way in this storm of strings and power
hearing someone cough in a performance

playing over the radio number 89.7 FM
is reassuring moved imperceptibly from
annoying I may be in the driver's seat
but the wind outside plays a strident note

all the way from Ozymandias to loss just
get out and walk the small voice says
without moving my lips my teeth clenched
still the long grasses beckon and wave

come play come count your steps if must
get inside the portrait of ghosts without
a frame this landscape sculpted by intentions
best and cheapest the sun higher now

turning turning falling through space

Driven to the Dram by Carol Ann Duffy

“Whisky you’re me darlin’ you’re leadin’ me astray

over hills and mountains and very far away” to the extent

that I was reading a poem of Carol Ann Duffy’s two days

nay nights ago already had my quota of the craythur

rose up from the chair went to the cabinet and extracted

another wee drop just one more for the short little

roads of the poem there in the lap just one more

for the twists and turns of the poet’s mind

‘tis not enough to turn the page one has to twist the cork

and release the geni from his long glass cave oh green

is the window in my foe’s prison tower we let him

out of an evening and that’s why the hills go dark

sure it’s the smoke of his fingertips reaching into

your brain and when the light comes he’s back

in his tunnel again pacing the walls there’s no ceiling

craning his neck to the neck to the butt end of that stopper

ah the grammar and the consonants and the high

stepping music now she’s got the gift our poet

and my eyes drink in the slantwise light of her letters

as the flood subsides and my headlands soft at last

go warm in the gloaming ah we’ll go roaming if we like

dear Byron so put away your pistols and your black

carriage and lay your head down before the world

burns itself alive with no end amen let the poet out

dear man open the door and let her grow tall in the night

she’ll come down to earth by morning the soles of her feet

smelling of owl scat and dried sedge she’s a bird she’s a cat

she’s the spider in the hall writing and writing

she’s plucking the old alphabet

for all the music it’s got left

Flash of White

Children's voices cross the ocean cross
the ocean to the island to the ground
solid as imagination will allow
there is no heaven but what's in us
then she's gone leaving me here
with a fourth wall oddly like
a computer screen press enter
in the corner of my eye a movement
can shadows be pure like children's
laughter or summer linen laid across
the hedgerows between showers
bleached by the sun worn to that
one gathering of beings a bouquet
of bluebells and dappled light
a blanket on the ground littered
with leaves fallen so many seasons gone
there was no need for a throw
and so I don't know any of this
her name the color of the ribbons
undone the purity of laughter
in the smoke of nostalgia
for an event I can't swear to
only sense in passing over
my shoulder I'm bending
for the asparagus in the morning
a flicker of white a rise
in cadences within if that's where
heaven is she's there with summer
and shy bluebells nodding and
shadows I seem to have ignored shadows
avoiding the whole truth now
destined to a life in ghostly passage
between my experience
and someone else's memory

AS IF HE WERE

As if he were the moon he pulled gently
the stalks the stems the leaves that follow
the flowers their pistils the stamen teased
coaxed with his long ethereal fingers

day or night even when his powers waned
a slim curvature of light but he was
not the moon she realized and she
lay down with the wind in a ditch

in that thick hot summer nothing would
bring her up again it seemed all memory
of his coming were some fanciful myth
some pattern of rising and falling

following the sun he was the moon
said the wind he was not said the ditch
and she ached and she arched and sighed
and the ground cracked open looking for him

Jack Lives at the Beach

Jack lives at the beach. Breaking waves
are his night music. Taking long strolls
along the tide lines his morning news.
Sand turns up in his trouser cuffs, boots
outside his door. Bright debris
tumbled in the lapidary of the shore
till edges soften over time among the stones
find their broken state renewed
like dragon's hoard in flower pots.
Pieces of glass white green brown blue
wait like found treasure till one is chosen
by Jack's wife Louise, the jeweler, for a pendant
rimmed in gold while the rest simply continue
to be found, a clutch of orphans once cast away
now gathering light in their new lodgings
never in one day arriving all at once since this
depends upon Jack living at the beach
day after day, year after year, gleaning,
redeeming what was once considered
useless and thrown away. Jack lives
at the beach where strings and percussion
sections of the oceanic orchestra guide him,
brass and woodwinds, too; the watery
distinctions mix night with day
and his art transforms the ordinary.

The Flash of the Matrix

It's got the ocean in it she says.
He moves closer to see the sea in her necklace.
She catches his breath. Not unpleasant.
An achievement for anyone over 40 she thinks.

What was he thinking? Hopefully nothing.
Hopefully she had intercepted whatever
passed between head and heart and
back again. Just breathe indeed.

By now he is completely utterly
immersed in the element of her scent,
lured effectively by the flash of the matrix.
Ghosts, she recalls, do get this close

but without such heat. Radiation? Emanation?
Yes. Now his arms lift involuntarily.
My God, she wonders. Can he swim?
She hears him gasping for air. Beauty

does that, she remembers. Will he still
talk to me afterwards. After I save him.
He begins to vibrate in that instinctive
rhythmic way. The way of the animal

power. The waves lap all around now
and she begins to sing. As if his life
depends on it. After all there are rocks
out there suspended in disbelief.

Thinking of the Other Side

Thinking of the other side of the other's
I'd like to talk with the others eyed by
my inner mind the Oh There! sighed
chin to palm to elbow head alea
and aloft clouds soft and whereabouts
suspended in the mountains nothing
to tell the messenger who waits
but for the resident frog's silence
all last night as if this stillness
stopped his grumbling for once
or was he just afraid to speak
for fear the spell would break
and he might not hear the wind
making her way down the peaks