|
|
|
|
|
NOVEMBER
Witches' hats, orange and white on broad black heavy brims
Abandoned, lie spillikins scattered on the road.
They curse my dragged commute, blaze threats in ambush,
Spin laughingly away if I hit. Lights, too, are red and orange commands.
This now the deconstructed grammar of my life, traffic jam on it,
Broken tarmac surface, a hurried morning going nowhere
As drivers comb hair, pick nose, talk on phone, settle kids
In metal, glass capsuled space, engines running, wheels still.
Somewhere I left, slow swell roughly caresses a responding strand,
The hills laugh streams under a high azure sky,
Berries blaze orange, red for birds busying to migrate
A house grows colder, no fire there.
GLASGOW TO EDINBURGH, SINGLE
Winter. Afternoon is short, bleak, cold.
Empty mountains of the Highland line look down,
the last of a fitful sun gleaming on high snow fields.
Slagheaps of the midLothian coalfield sit,
squat little manmade hills, too regular,
ignore the passing train which runs
on diesel now.
Fur patches of mangy birch
colonise the slag reluctantly,
scrub trees low against a lowering sky,
inhaling coaldust in their lungshaped leaves.
Rainfall digs deep seams of black in the blunt cones,
washes spreading widows' skirts to edge the miners' terraces.
The shuttle-train moves in assured progress, quick modernity
in the looming dark
to the crumpled white rose of Murrayfield, concrete symbol
of old loyalties, games some men still care
for passionately, some pretend.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
BALES
There is no room
at the rents in the heavy black plastic bale of silage
for every sheep,
and ovine wisdom has not yet
discovered the queue.
They nudge and jostle,
shoulder and rib, skull, small hard horns,
and push.
Some stretch upwards to reach high food
and so tire easily, are pushed aside,
rear legs quivering with the strain.
Others lie, disconsolate
and eye the feeders with still black yellow-ovalled eyes
and chew a diminishing cud
regurgitated from the second stomach,
with sideways grinding motion
milling it for the third.
Rain falls, and night
as, unevenly, they fatten for the market.
A GOOD EXAMPLE
A good example of the potter's craft does this,
Makes my hand wish to cup, to curve in upon the cool glazed clay.
So too a young child's cheek or shoulder.
What is this shape that makes my hand move of its own accord
As my mouth bends in bowed smile, eye-lids halfclosed?
Meandering river, the hull of a boat, the face-on
Dipped body of a wing-spread gull. The letter C
Itself so often starts the shape, as curve and cup and corner.
Is it the grasp, the grip, seizing, holding? No, not the opposable thumb
More the gentle hollow of my hand and what most fondly falls there,
Bright spring water slaking summer thirst,
or what magics its own palmistry as I fumble with the clasp.
|
|
|
|
|
