The Spirit of Glory
I can’t look you in the eye.
Your gaze burns my skin –
but fixates me on a place to lounge in
with movie screens for windows
and wrap-around murals:
the sky's blue, the meadows are golden.
So I must try to feel content
to move within your sun-kissed walls
when clusters of leaves play across their surface,
and to be comforted by the wood pigeons’ muffled tapping –
although I don’t know how to reply.
My hands can’t find a handle.
But behind me along the long corridor
the figures are beckoning
mother, father, a playful dog
weekends out of the city
camped beside the still young river,
the mornings clean and endless.
Images now, they're mounted in my back room
under a high and vaulted ceiling:
a shelter with no door.
It’s all we knew how to want.
Maybe the sun that drives all things
can cool into clear watchfulness;
can offer a key,
a heart-burning key
to turn to what lies beyond.
Days there are dry and dirty grey.
Speech is louder than ever,
though the people are small with bitter voices
hungry, thirsty, scratching our walls ....
How to reply
The earth then is covered with coins
bright as the day we forged them,
with your imperial face stamped on one side,
a dead beast on the other.
****
Time for Compassion
Among the trumpet-solos of the age of gold
shame is a fading voice.
Or lost altogether.
There are no solemn messengers at the door;
in here it’s all flashing lights and heat.
Sketching a world for a travel guide.
Until at night, the border approaches,
and the strings that pull the hours go slack.
Heat hangs under a copper moon,
probing through what my brain has packed ...
and the bric-a-brac of name and place
melts down. But no farewell drain;
just a sloshing to and fro, to and fro,
pressing against my skin.
It takes lingering there to open the nameless ...
then the lips of presence part.
And in the slow pastel dawn
its long tongue licks away the shreds of memory,
the dress of things, the gestures and what they invite ...
until there’s no-one here to get drawn out;
nothing left to search for.
Only a native warmth;
suspended, but forming its body
in the wish to say something,
the wish to touch ground.
So lady light, come, lay down some shadows.
Dress them with creamy sprays and pink blush,
flourish bullfinch and hawthorn berries,
add the scent of lush and greasy streets,
and bare legs and arms - the parade
along which the wheels of circumstance roll,
pulling onwards ... into our summer.
Then I'll seek good work and a place that fits.
I’ll break out as a flood of faces,
jubilant, arguing, weaving our story –
as you coolly pass on through.
****
The Green Lineage
In my summer day, the oak is king –
carrying house and ship and church for a thousand years;
the outreach of long boughs forming a canopy
that governs the overbearing light.
Nestled on the swelling earth,
its shifting dapple shapes and floats:
identity is a revelation defined by shadow.
So I look up and on at a transmission that
raises the entanglement of sun, rain, air and soil
into the green communion:
to breathe, take form and be consumed.
In that light, kings are priests,
enacting and enacted - a sacred succession.
When the green force withdraws, it is autumn.
And I am done with growing and perishing,
knowing and unknowing,
and with wealth sold off as numbers to make the flags flutter.
So, as the mind of gold dies down, winter is a release,
a casting off of the glow of things
rather than a final judgement.
On that day of the holly
the nestling remains, but is a settling into flesh.
Scarlet berries, in a cluster of tough prickles,
carry the seeds of the sun,
ripening through embodiment.
The grey day waits, the holly remembers.
In her summer it is evening,
the time of sacrifice.
****
Time without Hours
In the fragrance that calls up evening roses,
there is a time with no clear beginning
when the light and the land sink into each other.
It's the time when what things do sits down:
the solar dance of shafts through the trees
subsides from the intensity of distinction
into an ambiguous afterglow.
It is warm. I still have friends whose voices are moving through –
though many would say they're dead now;
but what we were and might yet be dies every moment
into an appearance that never lands –
just as between soft white wings and sudden talons
the owl hovers, quartering the field
in which all form is numinous.
And empty. Like a parked car that’s offered
meaning and purpose by an open, aimless road ....
And – just as the house that stood secure
against the seasons of sky and outlaw hills
gets filled when walls unbind into open doors and windows,
filled by space and voice and listening – true summer
arises only when I push the lid off my casket
and climb out of what I think I’ve become.
And when – as with the uniformed lights stood in dark streets
that mimic what was free and flowing
to stare over banks and empty forecourts –
a freezing stare pins me down,
I close those eyes; feel each breath enter the time
that enters – and turns the mind penumbral.
It is warm. For those who are still young
light offers the romance of stars and moon
though not for one or all ... or evermore.
While the time that grows throughout us,
like a rose unfolding through an unfolding rose,
diffuses summer and brings the light home.
Its dark heart shines: you're not alone.