Childhood Cycle #1

WHERE THE SPIDERS SWAY TO REST

at dawn epeira once again, cruel ladies of the traps,
in brittle body patience weaving webs of charm
between the branches of our tree, the bolting moon
has strings like toy balloons on children’s thumbs,
in chemical geometry they gather the essentials
of the day

epeira once again, true poets, gritty pioneers,
so short of breath when mending their dendritic nets,
who with a wisp must feast upon the world,
like us they mourn the falling of the leaves,
now soon the monarchs will be drifting south
and then the geese will go, ditch-divers drown,
the little garden birds will join the passing clouds

then death is in your paling face,
who watches from the balcony,
then death is in the fly’s kaleidoscopic eyes
that claim: now it is time!

FEELING GRAVITY PULL

Tonight the sun has died like lemon juice
descending into ice-cubed Blue Lagoon.
Your smile has cut me off from my own world
and thrown me into yours and far beyond.
With ease I glide along the scarlet arcs,
the crimson blaze of Venus stalks the night.
Preposterous my life has been before
I learned the art of boundless flight.
At once I stay aloft and understand
the majesty of hovering.
Suspended over ceaseless void,
this is the way I fall into infinity.

One solitary tear creeps through my face,
through winding constellation passages.
A liquid without name on incised maps,
inertial forces pulling, pulling down.
Along the lower rim of blessedness
the harsh line of the absolute appears.
I balance on frail edges of great dreams,
but with a vengeance I come down to earth.
But say, is it the hardness of the ground,
the unforeseen abrupt momentum’s halt
or is it the unyielding smile of yours
that in the end will make me want to crack?

SWAY

I sway ….
drunk with memories of lullaby madness,
like fanciful wooden figurine mobiles sway
in breezes from gaps of summertime windows,
sway in cradling arms below swaying breasts
in the comfort of love-speckled houses

…. sway ….
in ways that only tiny hands can in oversized gloves,
sway and find stability in intimate heroes, sway
as colourful kites must do at high altitude vistas
of faraway blue and swaying long grass green
indulging hassock-hunched meadows

…….. sway ….
in delicate rowboat embracement on autumn lakes,
distracted by timid tinges of togetherness, sway
like driftwood bumping at drowning ducks’ tails
that sway like pennants among the sheltering reeds,
swaying in irreparable innocence

………… sway ….
transfixed by the solemn sounds of chapel knells
that brought me to this place, whose melodies,
not half as sweet as Christmas bells, sway to and fro
in tops of aspen groves, across overgrown graves,
dying their weeny wintry deaths

……………. sway ….
in harmony with sad translucent graveyard ghosts,
almost invisible to human eyes, but not quite gone,
who sway as they patrol the land and tell of tales
and names inscribed on marble tombstone walls,
names that sway in minds who won’t forget

I sway …. cannot fall

CHILDHOOD'S RETREAT

Winter evaporates with
the sound of spiders breathing,
with the scent of wool mittens
drying on heated-up radiators,
when morning gossip escapes
through tiny leaks in ceilings
and curried tomato soup
simmers on the back burner.
Grandpa jingles the change
in his baggy trouser pockets,
so skinny we can smell his bones,
parading the cracked pavement,
dabbing his white handkerchief
at the corners of his eyes,
biding until the sun comes up
like a red-faced neighbour
peeking over the pleached hedge,
now that finally spring begins
to fall in line before us decorously,
the nature of all that must
be transformed with a sense
of being alive twice.

THE CLEARING

Like old white China doorknobs, scuffed and sad,
the wooden fence posts rise above the fog,
where cows are cuddling by the cattle shed,
a spotted horde before the water trough.
The mornfrost mourns the shepherd moon, too soon,
too soon, the dew drops dance under the hoofs
a glassy ballet of the dawn and swoon
as savage sunlight climbs the farmstead roofs.

And we, the ghostly watchers of the past,
mere spectres of our childhood days, now find
the meadow parched, the lushly grass has passed
away, the ground mist cleared, the straight-tined
harrow ploughed the feeble fence posts back
like blown out matchsticks, valueless and dead.

***

Like blown out matchsticks, valueless and dead,
the broad-leaved forest stands and stares. Begone,
the restless rustling of your guise! The fat
tree trunk lies pockmarked now, an upset pawn
upon the dirty chessboards of our youth,
and where the ancient carvings of our names
once gleamed, a solemn oath, unspoken truth,
vile insects crawl and play their fecund games.

But look! A buzzard buzzes overhead
and waits on brown-white wings, its dark blades flash,
a vigilance we shared before it fled
together with our airiness, white ash,
black ash, scorched billets-doux remain unread
like diaries self-penned we later shred.

***

Like diaries self-penned we later shred,
our days keep falling from the sky, too late,
too late, too many empty words unsaid.
The silence of the wood has sealed our fate,
we linger with the clearing sun-exposed
in summer heat, inert and half asleep,
a lifetime spent, another chapter closed
on brook banks where the willow myrtles weep.

There is a sandhill on the clearing’s edge,
now hidden under crumpled leaves and blight,
a marble run beside the hawthorn hedge,
and when you have a long close look you might
undeck two glossy globes, one white, one red,
like old small China doorknobs, scuffed and sad.

RAIN CHORAL

The bloated spiders have caught fog
and bound it just before the rain sets in,
they must have sensed the miniscule strikes
of vertical trickles multiplying
in stony recesses of street gutters
to resonate in concerts without monotony.

The window trembles, I wait for the moment
in which liquid glass shatters into crystals.
They never feel guilty about
the havoc they create, and now I sit
and stare with eyes fixed in unsurprise
at things losing their weightiness.

Mother’s cello appears to be haunted by water
and rings like a vibrating tuning fork
in harmonic response to the storm-gore.
I point my finger towards the horizon,
want to draw a single line of motion,
a sempiternal highway to the hiding sun.

Out there at the kerbstone I spot
the mirage of a man on the road,
early morning collapses into his skin,
and a broken teenage phone listens
to underwater libraries of verse or song.
It all vanishes with the sun. It has rained.

INVENTING COFFEE-COLORED HORSES

Late afternoon sinks into the tall grass
that grows on this side of the parking lot.
I smell the alchemy of damp-dark soil
assiduous ants have pushed toward the sun
and dream away the delicacy
of artful bulbous spire ice cream cones
sprinkled with hackled unicorn horns.

Shadows pushing creaking shopping carts,
the porcelain knobs on double doors gleam
like sugar-coated wood devoid of taste
and the electric horse is vaguely associated
with being loved by someone left in the sun
on the backseat of a compact car.

On these September days with its cardigans
and rain showers, I begin to memorise
broken poems on brick walls, on bodies of girls
and those the contrails draw into the sky,
and try to decode the language of growing up,
futile like forbidding rainbows to overlap

I picture myself crawling towards the horse,
with legs not strong enough to walk,
so out of place among the white numbers
painted on the concrete, that go up
as fast as years passing so quickly now
that I can hardly keep the mental image
of myself completely up to date.

HOUSE

After pre-dawn silence laid steadily
against the wood and stone,
I listen to the fireplace clock
chime a quarter, muffled brassy sounds
that resonate on patched ceilings,
dim stained-glass window light
separates the house like a table knife
sweeping across spaces I could fill,
private rooms with plank panelling,
painted a peculiar shade of purple
by professional anarchists, outside
crested front porch arches take shape,
the grillwork of the gate takes shape
and a primeval yellow-red sun
casts forth a somewhat cosy light.
I wrap my arms around myself to feel
a warmth so new as if the act of feeling
warmth hasn’t been invented yet.
The warmth persists, the house persists,
so sad that only an instant of myself
can survive in it.

THAW

The world is suddener than I imagined,
where frost flowers bloomed in crusty corners
suncicles unravel faint spidery webs
and bicycles leave random traces in slush,
down the path behind the chicken-house
a curiosity of spring feverishly unpacks,
with more than just a little girl’s delight,
the frame of a red plastic wheelbarrow,
yet not even the chicks by the shack
can recall the sound of gravel under wheels,
the world is too sudden for that.

AT THE CORNFIELD'S COMMAND

From blurry color contours of faraway slopes
full-throated winds come down across the plain,
not as a leeway howling, but as a whistling tune.
In the wake of thunderclouds an incurable silence
seizes the land and blankets the field at night,
keeping it much warmer than the sun ever could.

Gently the corn gives in to the gusts and sways
as if it walks the earth on skinny white roots with
ghost limbs of stalks ponderously set in motion.
Their eye-like shucks, twisted, bent, ready to dry,
soak up the possibility of rain and save it for
another day in the musty dampness of the soil.

Silhouettes of grisly elongated heads, they stagger
where the spectres of missing children roam and
bow under the shock from almighty thunder claps,
final cackling hymns to destruction, reluctantly
exposing the sinewy worms to the night air
in regular sacrilegious patterns of plowed rows.

The storm arrives, the stalwart ranks of corn gyrate
like manic dancing dervishes metamorphosed
into a hissing army of foreboding, spirits freed from
the demonic depths of hell, who whisper to each other
in gleeful expectation at the harvest of human souls
who carelessly ventured to go here unaided.

So many fallen solitaries never noticed amid a field
of thousands never missed, the secret sighs and thoughts
that say: god spare me one more day of being.
But now the moon breaks through, a murder of crows
sits on fences like home, the damned and dead may rest,
only the shadows of porches know more of their stories.