Leslie Philibert - 2
Golemunholy earth, dark with stein,
unformed loam at birth; a worded child of mud; fingernail skinned blacklack eyes peek out of a ball of wet slam, a groundling that waves like a black branch across the sleeping fields; see a shadow under the cold grass, near in sight under a crust of frost. What is Happening to You NowLight from this page; the bleached wood
Reflects; the cornea bends the wisdom, the Iris breathes each syllable and the retina sees All.Each phrase runs down the optic nerve Like a scalded cat in a greased alley. A banged-up neuronal room closed, locked And strange. What you started to read a few seconds ago has fallen apart and then been Joined again.Lights over the horizon ; a reaching out, a new moment; a healing. Frost
Hair of the spider,
the old man`s curse; spicules of ice That turn my windows into a French pattern; older than rime Feather frost; white as a virgin`s hair, hard as Winter`s face. A Blind Man Looks at the Sea ☊
Let me be sighted in the sea wash,
late waves, back water that curls as foam under the Moon, my face pulled to the tide, my eyes brothers in salt, no startlight, no endlight. Gulls sing at the first slight wind that changes direction in my ears. Let me drink all this; ebb and flood, wind and sea, sea and wind, flood and ebb. White Room
The windows of my soul have been
sheeted; cool and soft, white rooms and blank tiles digging in snow, sucking at ice in the last big cloud. Like a ballon I must be tied to the arms of the earth. So curl me up and wash all the mess out of me, being a shell of rubber and pumps. I am filled with things that once grew. My last lover, a box of lights and pictures. I might even wave or blow a kiss across the white sea. Let me be pushed, let me drop like milk. The Crystal Palace Is Burning
You do not expect glass to burn;
letting out the fire trapped in panes, white light having been caught before. But it does. They say you can see the flames as far away as Brighton. The end of an age. A widow in a frame of melted lead and cast iron. Flowers of smoke. A fallen bird, with ribs of a serious time. A Dry-Stone Wall Near Coleraine (for Seamus Heaney)
as if the pale stones
share the warmth between two sides; sea and field cut, early light and full morning; the path weathered and slow. Asperger
an island full of shapes
patterns of bricks and numbers and the thin voice of a bird lost on a strange planet; so start again and disregard all the faces that bend under order, just watch your own dancing hands, listen to your own stolen voice, you are deep in your own sense, underground until the world implodes, a puzzle flying, the lines crossed; a broken window full of stars. Shackleton's Grave
The end of a white road;
pearlwort in a stone square, cold and calm the wind. The tanning of a whale;seals at dance dog eyed in the morning and lost to snow, shapes like stones in new skins. Petrels fall out of the wind (sky and earth tipped;a passage into grey). So mourn for the green in another place. a distant bodhran;stones and breakers in white-boned water,shattered glass, endurance the last sleep.deep in fern. Midnight
a bent silence
unattended the changes subtle through the hours a white-horse star astray blocks of darkness that fall badly a town at sea beyond halo the night sky, holed cloth as a motor bees down a river-road full of coal starless, too late to guide the air empty.
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An Angular Boymucho akimbo, all elbows and knees,
sudden as summer rain, white as paper; he falls through doors and windows then, closed like a shop on Sunday; shutter-eyed, still as a nightbrook, a dry wheel under clouds; silent The Lost PoemShoved in a jacket, a folded heart
a breakage of notes about the body fascism. Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch. So sing then a song about Oswiecim, about the ice on the Sola, about Silesian firs, tell me the story of a train hanging under the stars, late from Hannover. Tell me in hushed words about a hole in a roof, about rushed concrete, about the sinking to ash. Then throw this poem into the Sun. No paper can carry this weight. Love
Let me be a casement
that you open when you look out of a window or a sill full of warm moss to rest your hands upon. Elegy
So when my profile
falls apart and every swing door greets a stranger an old man has kidnapped my soft face. My eyes are full of red lace my wrists alloyed with copper my body fallen into chinoiserie. So let me collect, talis qualis, small sins in a tin box postcards under shoes in a cupboard as the breaking of my shell is the looking at pictures through a window, bits of the past, calls on a dead line, everything gone but not gone. Walk Slowly At My Burial
take the pace out of step;
the black beetle crunches over gravel, a block of ice, stupid silence carried like a china cup nearly down, a ring of flowers, the first prize packed like a gift, six strong men are needed to carry my boxed bag of bones; flaps of skin and the old-man smell. Hold on. A moth in a lampshade couldn`t bruise its wings less; scared of the fall into cold loam. North
a puzzle of rivers and ice
a dead fish dances under a witch`s dress birthless you have become an ancient fir, seagulls bend slowly in the salt air and chatter over the freezing whores; the sinewed ships are full of string and cloth and wood that strain out the songs of men lost to earth; so pull through the alleys full of water, thick-footed with the glazed eyes of fish; winter`s door is ever open, trees that draw from the coast to higher ground: pure and wolf with frost. Childhood Beach
the sky sunk low to the sea
wet towels slapping in the wind young bathers; sea-eyed and water-faced with chipped front teeth sinews taut under young skin... and the ebb that makes stones drift between a child`s thighs down the beach down the beach running into the dilute a salt step crying footprints lived short as if just lost shouts stolen by the wind; time to go. Cologne Cathedral
The moon fallen next to the Rhein;
a black stone burnt and chipped as black as the night`s eye as dark as midnight`s coffee as hard as the last touch as strict as a monk´s hand as quartz as a buried knife as burnt as a warrior`s brooch. This bird gasps and loses feathers; sick with a stomach full of stones and a thousand years; two fingers pointing at heaven a block kneeling to water a prayer caught under a hammer a pale boy hanging on a wall. All ready to launch; to be pushed into the brown flood; over holy mud and under the ochre of early evening. Cold and quiet; let it take to water. Morning (for W)
your breath in the night
as outside the rain be kind slow your eyes bohemian glass but other in dawn be kind slow your drift over varnished floors a nightgown full flowered the chatter of cups and steam be kind slow. |
