framlingem

Also, a longer poem. I don't like this one as much, but it's funny - I can tell what I was reading at the time, and that I was reading villanelles and other poems with repeating lines.

( To a Man on the Bus )

We're made of stars, the physicists say;
the hydrogen from the birth of the universe
(such glory!)
and carbon from dying stars,
flung across the distance
to coalesce into flesh.
How marvellous.

The gold of your wedding band
is a supernova;
the cotton of your blue jeans
living things,
born and dispersed and born again.

I am content with this.
What need have I of gods, of
stories of immortality
when I am immortal already,
the atoms of me infinitely unlikely
and inevitable,
part of you once perhaps
part of some magnificent creature
light-years from here
part of the soil
part of the sky.

When I am no longer using them
they will be part of the earth,
part of plants then,
parts of animals again,
perhaps compressed by the weight of eons
into stone.

The Earth will age,
and I with it,
resurrected for ever and ever,
until the Sun grows old
and I will be once more a star.

Poem for Neruda.

When things are quiet and the world is loud,
I read your poems. I read them,
And the world is louder, but clearer, like bells over the mountains,
Like the feeling of cool water
Running
Between my fingers, and the light of it as it falls.
I read your poems.
I read
Them and suddenly I know love,
I know the terrible wonder of it and the despair
And the great simple hopes of someone’s laughter.
I know the being of a fish at market
And blood on the streets,
I know the sound and sight of cannons,
Cannons with wide mouths like
Caves in the mountains,
With the bells tolling over them.

"Elegy"

I remember all our lost tomorrows,
all the hot chocolate and coffee evenings
sitting in the same room in the dark.
I remember all the mornings of terrible
breath and hair in all directions.

I remember the way your cheek would have felt
beneath my hand, and the angle of my neck,
bent back to kiss you on tiptoe.
I remember the way you would have said my name,
and the surprise in your eyes at
the way I would have looked at you.

I remember that my parents would have liked you -
my father would have shown you his garage,
and you would have pretended to be interested
for my sake. And I would have done the same in
your mother's garden.

I remember the house we'll never buy, and
the arguments over the paint colors,
and I remember that I would have washed
while you dried.
And then I remember that it won't be me.
I remember all our lost tomorrows.

There will be no newspapers,
no articles, no three inches of inky life story.
Nothing will stop. No flags will fly
at half-mast.
It is a quiet life, of little consequence,
full of aborted grand gestures and
mad leaps before any
significant footprints were made.
There was never a finish line, only
endless track.

No, there will be no newspapers.
There will perhaps be ashes on the wind,
perhaps a song will be played,
perhaps a poem will be read. Hopefully not
Frye or Thomas.
Perhaps someone will laugh. Perhaps
there will be a wry smile, and perhaps
a moment of admiration for grand gestures, even aborted,
and for mad grinning leaps.

Today, I looked in the mirror and saw a mountain.
I saw my cheeks like the lowlands,
covered in wild roses in springtime;
I saw stormclouds of hair, dark and savage;
my eyes regarded me like granite and moss,
soft and hard.
I saw an underground river in my throat,
and my mouth a cave full of secrets and stalactite-teeth,
and there, the slopes of my shoulders,
wide and sturdy,
worn by the weight of the world
to a gentle peak,
an ancient and eternal shape.

(For accuracy's sake; I have fair skin, pink cheeks, grey-green eyes, and eternally messy, very dark hair. The hair in particular is about as black as a European-descended person's is likely to get.)

I want to write a thousand poems about rain.
about cold on my cheekbones,
about the sandal startledamp
of a puddle the next day,
about the isolation of a house,
about holding my arms to the clouds and slowly turning
around an axis I've found again,
about that day I hid with a boy under an unwise umbrella
while thunder shook our bones,
a poem about the rain being good camouflage for
the moments I can't breathe for tears.
I want to write a thousand poems about rain,
but rain washes the words away.