Sleep then, sleep among the stars
Dream of those days when your words replaced myth
Where all that you breathed, became the just so.

You created the coiled mornings,
And infused dust-filled days, that led
To evenings replete with quiet contentment.

What is the purpose of a life without beauty?
What is the purpose of a life without duty?
What is the purpose of this oblivion?

If you can understand it, it’s not ‘it’ you have understood
The gap between melody and each second tone –
Resides in an absence beyond language.

We know this place through faded recreations of creation
The tides wash away faces drawn in sand
Only light holds no appreciation, of time.

I meet ghosts who do not know they’re dead,
Who recite the poetry from the shade on the dial,
And know not from where, of a yet to come…

Of a wind that will blow dust from your throne,
And allow that cold magisterial, emptiness
To be filled again by your sublime sense of things.

the light at noon
spread over green:
fields of tender green,
recall a harvest
before time knew all,
but our names.

the seasons reinstate
grass bent beneath
the tread of innocents
who tried remaking the world.

memorials of thorn
uproot in a moment
and who are we to disturb,
what is left underneath.

how many lovers since
haunted by sacrifice
lay nameless across
England’s pungent greens.

in their kiss, we scatter
between the gaps
in the thriving
meadow soil.

and birds above, explode
from the time-worn trees
and wheel dreamlike, toward the sun.

There: in the distance
Snowfalls, heavier and heavier
Landscapes of solitude, muted
Not with grief but all-knowing.

What still moves underneath?

As I fell to thinking
You turned and said:
‘Come outside, watch it fall’
Those eyes, those eyes
Recessed through the glass
Bright and visible still
As the hereafter.

I open my eyes to let you go
And hold on a moment longer
As morning, and its forceful breath
Shears dangling blossom off the tree.
I remember you once saying
That beauty always comes too soon,
At precisely the right time.

Entropy.

If I dream of inaction …
I stand in that time before time
Where all possibility lays over
A field of bristling deep white
And all the words that are unwritten
Outreach every rune and star ever stitched.
Sometimes, I picture in absence
All things waiting to be connected
To one continuous present.
Where those not yet born
And those who have lived
Exist together side by side.
Were I then to write of action
I would be drawn by narrow pleasures
Into a slow but diminishing realm.

What is that sound, when water meets water.
Sometimes, far off, like fine down drifting,
then close by, giving it all up, in dull metallic bursts.
A man, and a girl like you, once met in the half-wind –
half-water, as it ushered night upon the wood.
As the trees exhaled, they saw how to be nude:
how to retrace a moon, from uncertain beginnings.
Tonight, it groans sideways into iron roofs,
that seem to bend double, even as they hold their own shape.
Somewhere, far off, the wind speaks a name,
as it whistles, bird-like, over deep water.
The unfathomable at rest, undisturbed,
murmur fluent lyrics to instinctive melodies,
which become lost, in the hour of the light.

Hunters from the dark
dancers in neat bunches
consolidate together as shadow.
Waiting for first light, they wait
to see what they become.
Their hands work busily down
broad cavalcades of ochre;
flames glint on vigorous tools.
Maneuvering across, they move
with bright reverence
and their own deep purpose.
On the wide grassland
each thing gestures an appetite,
and its consequence.

If at the end we become strangers, this last time
and collapse in on ourselves like a star.
Try to remember, how the light from morning
once stretched over a skyline, to settle on our crowns.

A fleeting city, a monument to ghosts and moments,
paused to anoint us. It allowed us to be,
who we had dreamt we could be
when we used to play in front of the mirror.
I try to imagine if the day never ended,
had the light not burned itself out
could we have remained in a city of memories?
And even now, as we return to darkness
I am aware of a horizon surrounding everything,
which has not yet disappeared.

water at dawn
runs by fingertips
onto cold stone
as a robin intones
ripe throated
staccatos
that bounce
along walls
that have see it all.

even after all
should I be happy
wasting this day
plotting a gap
in taste and ability
under giddy sun
that announces all
with a few spare
syllables.

we come apart
at the seams
snagged by the narcissism
in nostalgia
I once made my song
to enchant the night
like Scheherazade
striving to hold back
the encroachment
of a decree.

but bright
waterfalls of dust
continue to gather
in fine heaps
by the curtain
and a brown river
creeps on
eddying
inscrutably
in the deep

we are
migratory animals
but we never
really move
I won’t live
this day again
though I will
live it again
a thousand times

The sea speaks of longing
Songs of lost navigators
Echo in the cadence of dreams
Stowed half-known within.

Perhaps the rain made it so
Slanting across vague light;
Recalling the memory of itself
Having fallen there before.

Desire is the wind somewhere
Blowing the hair from your eyes
Agitating leaves away
From a child’s tree-house.

Only the dreamless forgo
The pain of things that’ll never be
As stars give out their grave glitter
Toward otherwise boundless dark.