Blindness
(originally published in the Lindenwood Review and nominated for the Pushcart Prize)
Tonight you open the soles of my feet
And rise in the capillary tubes of my bones
The grains of years drawn on them like circles
You keep rising to the deserts
And blind silken winds meet
The woman under your iris
Slow stones turn on their backs
And blood from an elephant tooth
Filters past my tissues into the four chambers
The first has a blue baby licking the molten thumb of fire
A bird flies in another, with surprise grating its wings,
Into hollows of unknown nights
Smouldering fires cook my blood in cauldrons of straw
And it crackles in the straight capillaries you rise in
To lock your eyes into mine
And we go blind
Love Resides in These Too
Gossamer- the finest thread, sometimes
The first discovery of the day;
Perception starts from it and spreads.
The holder of water and life
The spider’s gift to the garden
The summer’s thin belief, floating
Freely between the silent love
Of the morning and things.
You will breathe it in, odorless
And it will stick to your form, invisible
It will be there every morning waiting for you
Inglenook- the earth’s place in the Solar System
The perfect distance between things that sense
And things that incite
An old man’s comfort, a fire man’s despair
A circle in a campfire, a straight line in a fireplace
But solace nevertheless. We live because we
Know it will sometime be our place before
We leave the inglenook and enter the fire
Penumbra- the cast-off lightness of things
The body splitting in a joyous dance into
The many arms and hands of a goddess
The hidden meanings of life trying to take shape
Falsities along with the opaque truth
It is always there waiting at the margins
To engulf the whole shadow in its luminous halo
Petrichor- the smell of earth after rain
A taker to the unremembered and hidden.
It is minuteness hovering like a bee
Heralding the love that imbues the
Water with the soil. Energy flows
Out of the elements, enters us.
The smell changes into colour.
We see we are green, slowly ripening
Lagoon- a rare island of water
You can imagine it even if you’ve never seen it
It reflects like all water, it wears robes of ripples,
Hides its hazards, spreads out life like its own form,
Cajoles us into living, then makes
Us fall, only to find that it is not alone,
That we are not alone
