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A Reading From the Book of Change –
Duration and The Well
Wells city calls to me - its lowing, cathedral bells submerged,
the pregnant toll of whales - draws me along, as if water,
through narrow streets like caves. I stir,
lifted from a loam of wont, become aware
of an ambulance ululating on the Glastonbury bypass;
somnambulance propels me to gaze at piebald night,
a cavernous well I must never fall into, but may draw divinations from.
Floating on the moor, road-lights are creamy fish-eyes,
squirming in prehistories of lime beneath Chedder Caves.
Church-masons of times past used the stone to cast suggestions upward,
seashell fingers pointing to an emptiness of sky. Likewise
for the warning lights strung on the telecom mast, red
devil-marks suspended, weightless in a pencil-scaffold,
poised between cats-cradle cables, thrumming in freezing fog.
Trains ran across those watery levels once, you said,
iron behemoths in harness, drawn by the daemon
Progress, hungry for more than coal; purpose
is revealed within the lay of changing lines.
Whatever possessed you to move your houseboat
half-across England to Bath, when, over the Lee,
the view onto Hackney marsh, a flat-block horizon,
felt the same? Overhead wires, electric trains and distant sirens
with the charge of moving us, even in that hardened blister,
London. Walking home, tawny owls in cemetery yews
make hoax-calls to fool their rivals, older males. I grew up
believing people live in houses. Now, awoken by the pounding
blip, a Nokia cell-phone near the stereo, I turn around to read
your message, gazing from the hollow window of my single
room. Outside, distant floodlights wash over shell-cone spires,
frozen tallow candles; nothing stirs, entropy is held at bay.
You texted me your dream, a warning of consuming,
owl-eyed engines, only saved by knowing trains
cannot climb stairs. I am neither fooled nor swayed, but well-
aware the lines are changing. Fallen yarrow tells why stars
resound with such a cadence of importance: they remain
a ceaseless reassurance of a deeper source that will not ever cave.
A Reading From the Book of Change – Duration and The Well
was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007.
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Insoluble
He loved her, he hated her
schizophrenia, un-spooled
himself like film to catch
her spitting mind, insoluble
nova, caesium dissolved
in a watery crucible; her sweat-
soaked hands. He clutched
her like a cut across the gut,
terrified he loved her
the same way a camera
loves old photographs.
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Euthanasia of the Big Yew
When the surgeon goes in, who decides?
I cried as they chopped down the big yew -
callous yet careful, chainsaw for scalpel -
every crooked elbow to the nook, each knuckle,
dropped against the mildew, bucked and shook
one hallowed second, lingered until standstill.
Home now, light a candle, stay the night up
doing vigil; anger spills like amber resin, setting
recollection: snaking brontosaurus necks,
their heads of teal needles, dotted ember-red;
thick-rutted flesh, split-hollowed chest,
smooth, ruby tears of glue; embedded
roots, asleep beneath a sheet of cast-bronze darts;
wrenching as I wept and watched them take apart the yew.
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You Mummers of Lounge and Parlour
Role-Play Gamers, charmed
by magical, cast-plastic dice; strolling
players on your sofas, pastoral
fancies, tinged by nightmare, passed
like biscuits over coffee tables. Brave
enough to take the extra slice—
while other men and women laugh
in the right places, wear their rictus-masks
and train for adulthood's dark hood
—you dare to differ, lose face, don
the rigours of a visage not your own.
Solve problems unrelated to taxation,
pensions, matrimonial vexations, homes.
You, optimist, you, wish-smith, dungeon-
delver, fantasist, naïve and sly.
Arrival is as nothing to the travel;
you smile at dilemma – tousled, matted luck,
at misdirection – twisted, gnarly death.
You love like sisters, brothers, templar
knights and heralds of bardic justice;
fair as physicists and passionate as priests,
you ward-against gangrenous undeath with faith
in fables, shared and interactive mythos.
Even life's cold, burning riddles hold
a grail of lust.
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