Friday 14 March 2008

Logarithm

It is midnight now

and now

and now

and now

and now

and now

and now

and now

and now

and now

and now

and now

tomorrow

it is starting

to leak out of today


a mitotic bubble of posterity

made up of logarithms of ice

under a sun

too hot for time




Seven lifetimes of peat

Beyond the unused pier

Old Sea was wave lite

on a rocking chair listening to the radio of the sky.


The islander stood on worn stone

with a saucerful of his silence,

spilling not a drop.


Drifting spells were broken by a whee-wail-whining sea bird.

Herring Gull.


Has the smell of rain about it, he says of the night,

a night as pitiless as a hearse full of dominoes

pacing towards the cureless collision with sunlight.


There's six peat hags on the back hill

decayed like old ewes’ teeth,

seven lifetimes of peat lie in their tobacco wombs.


Two summers ago I heaved the unsmoked earth

with needled shoulders, dwindling arms

for the last time,


today creels are brittling by the back door

beside knives blunted by tea-strained rain.

I still hear the songs of the cutting squad.


But the undried loam will wait,

wait for soft hands and savages

to enkindle the sky with oranges and reds.

Mood Music

Going up to an idea of north*

to house-sit, seeking reclusion

surrounded by mountains and clear water.

The camera is loaded with big

bullets of light. I’ll use the ice

(I hope there’s a frost), bracken,

the brimming dish as target practice.


Packed and ready, cigars and books.

Have remembered my eagle magnet,

said a prayer to the patron saint

of cloudlessness and stolen moments.


Though if there is any

robbing to be done

it will be by me

daylight of it’s easiness,

the wind of open sails,

wings. Comets and ghosts

of the dark, airwaves

from radios and space


Let me lie in a seven-day grave

stashed in harmony with the soil,

its limbless motion

roots, boots, fallen apples


as the family of silences next door

lip-read the candlelight, pull the curtains

and at the third stroke mute the speaking clock.


* stolen from the first instalment of Glenn Gould’s Solitude Trilogy