The barefoot poet walks carelessly
over the last shards of his wisdom:
crimson, green, blue, yellow shards
glinting by the autum gloam.
Far from bleeding his feet sing out
all the paths he never wandered
all the paths he is just traversing
all along the next life.
The uneventful life of a poet
barefoot in soiled dungarees
deadheading carnations
first thing in the morning
trying to balance the scales
of justice and madness.
Satiated his magpie need
to shiny words
he leaned a ladder
against an invisible wall
to climb for his shadow
stolen by the dimming stars.
He hears goat-bells
from a violet distance,
the rustling of some cipress
that godly seems
to hallow the morning
crowned by a sun
forever in childhood
forever in gold.
An old van rusting away
by an elm-lined footpath,
a cat stares at me bemused
like someone seeing a ghost.
A dray horse weary near
an old stone trough
bites a beam of sunshine,
huffs and puffs at hearing
my sighs.
There is an apple tree nearby
a honeycomb of irate bees
there is a beetle corpse dragged
by ants on a straight line
there is a din of merry birds
circling above
and the sudden sight of a naked
maiden riding a deer
there is the hermit's ramshackle hut
where I'll be kipping for a while
over the dead leaves
a brownish skull as a pillow
a firefly as a lover.
*
Like a salesman
who sells pure mornings
never stained by polluted cities
venal glories,
I sat over an oak stump
to bargain with the stars above
my next cloak of invisibility:
there hardly I am but I am
at least bedazzled
by the flying squirrel
about to jump
upward to the moon.
(2007)
Like a moth buzzing around a flower- her whirr of voice
as she can't alight on a word.
(Virginia Woolf)
I cannot find the right word
to define my present station of life.
Maybe quietus, maybe oddling.
Oddling crow in the quietus
of a back and forth existence.
The right word is a moth flitting
around the light we'll never see
for good. The right word is
like Democritus in his garden
laughing off for nothing
while tending black roses.
*The inability to remember a particular word or name.
I do well in the shade near the hydrangeas
and my dreaming cat without the tyranny of the sun
spotlighting everything I do well.
Only the violet shade can shine
all this black brooding from the spirit,
the wishfulthinkingness of life.
A true poet is a hawker crying out
to sell the goods of his soul knowing
that only the Devil can afford them.
.
