Paul Mortimer - 2
Baggage Check InDo you have any sharp objects
in your luggage such as scissors, a screwdriver, a tongue not under control? Do you have any toxic substances such as organic peroxides, corrosives, poison in your veins and/or mind? Do you have any ammunition such as blasting caps, flares or information to harm friends who harmed you? Do you have any items not in transparent containers such as liquids, contact lens solution, a broken heart? Do you still want to fly from here? Crows Weep a RiverHe was a piece of night,
broken off, left behind. A crow smudging daylight and in his eye a star was trapped. He wept it free on high moors and it began to run through sphagnum moss, round granite, gathering up a thousand crow-dropped stars. It led them to a hollow, there they pooled and waited. Another day, a cloud burst of crows, a dam breaks, a galaxy streams downhill, sears through the valley. Being HumanIn mist-light the great white house
is blue-grey. Sucked into a murk where borders fade. Where the certainties of hedges, fences, a double gate are suddenly exposed as quicksand. Like comfort income security ambition. From across the river I watch the house slip in an out of view. I wait for the sun knowing it will come. Like phases of the moon, like the herb robert flower on a roadside verge, like the departure of tree summer leaves, like the cycle of life I’m riding just now. 
The poet and his mother, 1955
Memory Bank ☊The first time I had amnesia
was in Hong Kong. I was five. I don’t remember. The second was in Cyprus. I was ten and found wandering Limassol’s streets. So I stand in awe of those who recall childhood days, opening up a tap in their hippocampus and pouring out places, friends’ names, events even conversations. My memories are absent. They stand on the other side of then and now, a canyon between with no linking bridge. Not even ghosts teetering on the far side’s edge. The only triggers are mother’s photo albums, the past caught in a zoetrope flicker of black pages and her immaculate white writing. My home town
It is a stranger to me.
I have no recall of sunlight curling through the streets where sparrows have a dust-up in hedges. No sound of cathedral bell slicing apart cold blue mornings. No granite-washed, moss-scented air blowing in from the Glyders. No days bunking off school with mates to fish on the Elwy and explore down river. No joining a murmuring queue waiting for the coast-bound Crosville bus. Before my eyes could weld all this into my memory banks we had moved on and moved on and moved on. Nomads gathering places, a litany of other people’s home towns. Comments? |
To an Unknown ArtistLight is yours to command.
You will use this energy, a magician casting burning into shadows where it scatters black into fearful places leaving it to tread lightly across mercurial paths. Opening furnace doors you allow molten photons to pour across canvas shaping and reshaping into colours that cling to your eyes. With brush and sight you weave patterns pulled from nebulae that have been created by a sorcery above thinking until paint and mind and flames and vision flare and die. You sit spent in dark, head on chest your name locked in the brush that hangs limp in your hand. Rage fuseI pulled at the thread
in my hard-wired head. Just a loose end but a tug and a pluck sent it all round the bend. I’d broken a circuit and out of my mind came the rage and the fire. Anger gushed out, a withering spout and then I laid waste to drivers computers phones and the news. the rain and the pain and those incompetent fools. Then it was spent and I had to apply the heat of the whiskey to solder the thread back into my head. Chasing the sunsetTwo shotguns let go
and echo through woods. A thunderclap of crows explode from the trees, flecks of soot swirling on the breeze. Gathering their wits they flap slowly over fields, drifting low as if flying is not worth the energy. and gradually this flock morphs into dragon smoke. It catches an air current, writhes down river, chasing the day to its flare-out point. This sinuous darkening cloud, breathing stretching reforming as it smokes downstream. Heat draws it on to the setting sun. As it reaches the estuary a glow beats in its heart. Turns into a flicker, quickens. Flames swallow smoke. Dragon fire blazes, scorches, then flares apart. And a flock of fire birds heads out to sea. Dry Stone Wall BuilderThis one particular stone
has its place. Weighed in his hands, turned over, turned round. His keen eyes scan surfaces for notches, ridges, flat spots. Seeking for a point where it can interlock with the wall that already armadillos away down to a gate. The day is hostile, cold wind slicing everything needle rain hunting for anything. Ragged moorland sheep, constantly chewing nothing much, hunker in the lee of the grey wall. All the time he carefully adds stones making sure compressional forces alone are binding. He’s found his place. Repairing an enclosure that cannot contain an impulse to extend the past into future. ♢ |
