February And Beyond

Novelist Dead or Alive

The sun pours out
from a broad rift in high clouds
like gravy onto the dry
meat, potatoes and two veg.
of a Monday lunchtime.

On the corner of Catherine Street,
the stalwart woman who stands with
field-sport, folded arms in her tall doorway,
and the shrew-faced lady in the chequered headscarf,
who plants herself well back by the kerb,
as they declaim magisterially
over the intervening and the interim,
simply forget their lines
for a moment
of bewilderment.

I am a nausea,
a dalek claw robed in a dark car.

Deep and woolly cumuli,
imitating each other,
conspire for silver linings. They
shutter and un-shutter the sun.

Considering their scope and coverage,
anchor-persons,
and outside-broadcasts galore,
it is amazing how often the sun slips her way
through the maze.

Spring coils to strike!

Sheep once more are grazing.
They stump cloven hooves
and chomp ruminant pegs
on the hillsides,
stuttering their leery baas at precious little,
and boggling at will.

Schools spill out:
the few girls in tights,
have shy, sunny-day smiles.

The self-important crossing man,
young for the job,
reflects his nobility in those
he assists and those he detains:
of Mighty-mice and Men of Steel -
but drags his feet a little as he leaves.

‘Fowles in the frith
the fisshes in the flood...’*

Am I wholemeal slices of 
Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath,
should ship myselves  ‘Dylath Silvas’?

No. I am a minced hydra
in transition;

and yet the afternoon seeps in ease
caught between the futility of forgetting
and the futility of remembering.

The sky, the clouds,
the sun
now filling everything with such ochre
and yet
so clean an ideal light
as if there were nothing
more than meditation and her gifts
both of inner peace and deepest yearning.

March pounding urgent on a belly-up Poseidon.

“Get out of there and write the thing!
You coward man! You bunch of red, red roses!”

.........................................
 
*Birds in the woods, and fish in the sea....