DISTURBED

Here's a novelty:

with family outdoors,

I’ve house to myself.

No other agenda

than revising lists

of things-to-do;

surrounded

by the incomplete.

Slap-bang in mid-potter,

a wail from the garden -

“Come and see” -

breaks such reverie.

Its sun-warm stone lifted,

a limbless misnomer -

neither slow nor worm -

blinks and writhes,

shiny antidote

to my paper life.

Curious, anxious,

I reach out

for fragile grace.

It slips my rash grasp,

sheds tail in self-defence:

a lifeline left flexing,

reflexing down the path.

Part-death by design.

Hand-picked at second try,

the lizard slides

over palm, through fingers;

trails ichor

from its breaking point.

We note the subtle marks

of age and gender

on smooth skin.

Guarding stumpy survival,

I place our amputee

in a compost refuge,

chosen for its slugs.

A notched tongue

flicks defiance.

iii.2002

DAUGHTER

They say eyes are the place where love begins.

Yours are blue:

not sad, forlorn or tearful as in a thousand songs,

but strong and brave.

In them I see you

swinging from monkey-bars with arm in cast,

or taking a cardboard box toboggan

down the stairs.

Also hand on hip,

upbraiding me for some dim-wittedness,

with mock exasperation

and a grown-up turn of phrase.

My pearl with pigsty hair

not often tamed,

whatever the choice of clips and grips and bands:

You are the rose that hatched.

i.2003

SON

There's a picture in my head:

a garrulous, gap-toothed grin

emerging from the surf sun-blond,

all gangly angles.

Inheritor of my bony string-bean frame,

you’re older now.

I’m picking your tomatoes,

pardoning the insolence,

anticipating the pleasure of losing at chess

for the first time.

Punk baby,

tremulous then at climbing frames,

will you recall the anthems

I once sang you to sleep with?

v.2000

SWIMMING MY AGE

From shock of deep end dive

to a shallow turning

is thirteen, fourteen, or

fifteen strokes depending

on the force of kick applied,

and reach of outstretched glide.

 

Boredom kept at arm’s length,

I am a metronome

counting the span of years.

Voices lose their bearing

between my muffled ears:

all is rippled hubbub.

 

Raising my mouth for air,

shoulders shrug at might-have-beens 

as hands pull back in prayer.

Hips, the source of power,

plunge me forward groundless

through backwash of flashback.

 

Beneath the broken surface,

a bygone shadow play

looked down on, goggle-eyed,

refracts in cobbles of light,

splashing bottom and side

with fluid parallels.

 

Across my face, bubbles

stream the exhaled distance.

I whip legs together

to trim resistance -

a trunked back number, skin deep

in rhythm of reckoning.

 

x. 2002

GALE WARNING

“Dover. Wight. Portland. Plymouth.

Southwesterly. Storm force ten.”

Season of soggy letters,

collapsed fences, and thrashing trees.

“Imminent.”

 

Buffeted from a filigree path,

I’m woken unawares

to roam other neural tracks,

startled by lightning synapses

in rainy night.

 

From a broken gutter

cloudburst spills onto concrete.

At the junction of sound and light:

the cadence of your name,

rising and falling.

 

“Visibility:

moderate locally poor.”

Jack-knifing across the highway,

an artic gouges tyre ruts

in the verge of memory.

 

Thunder. Counting seconds

to measure the distance we’ve come.

Down those roads not taken

I lunch with your ghost, the unfledged stirring

of wind-blown thought.

 

v.2003

Ariadne's Thread #7, June 2013