VERSEWRIGHTS
  • Welcome
  • All Poets
  • PoetryAloud
  • Inbox Peace
  • The Press
  • Journal Archives

Leslie Philibert - 3


Italy: Three Short Poems

Capri

roofless cubes, spidery with wire
cakes of azure and enzian;
above at the Villa San Michele
Rilke smiles down at the broken beaches,
at coves of defiant waves, compacted sea

Pompeii

a chessboard of honest stones
open to a sky of hushed shouts;
we huddle in a boned frame
of another life, a stopped day

Napoli

warm and secret, olive-eyed,
an infinite beauty makes a new face
as the gaze ape-like from our bus;
an act of moment
​

Winter Onions

my little round sleepers with 
lots of coats on, mud huggers 
​with a tribal bottom 


perfectly lined up at the 
bus stop of spring, soft under 
the cold loam, a miracle 

despite the banality of hidden 
numbers; time to drink tea as 
I wait in a cooling garden
​

The North Cape

a wind of old nails
             broken stones
the sky a guilt of rain
all these stunted trees
              grasp over wet moss
seagulls are unborn children
              that cry over the tundra
this is the end of a measured world
this is the e nd ofa mea sured wor ld
​

Film School

Suddenly, lights from a car outside.
Ghosts on a wooden floor,
created by a window and snow.
This is the way you leave the world.
​

Black Dog

A black dog has
               chewed the string of my heels,
               followed my eyes,
               heavy with dark corners,

pushed me over the fence,
               down the path,
               broken with stones,
               cruel with gravel

and follwed me into the shallows
              where I hit the tide
              with the flat of my hand.
​

Donegal

A line of stones;
the threat of so much space,
a fallen horizon.

Salt grass
coarse with rain,
nights heavy with tides

and the battered steel
of the sea, the broken gong
of the moon, strange friends.

Then, I know not what to call
the rough curves of peat,
slight of the sea,

a bodhran wind over the rocks.
When I am no more
let me melt in the rain

of this cold coast,
its own name shaped,
the seagull`s call.

Paperboy

The cold changes
the weight of my steps.
Each door opens with glass.

Dogs bark in circles.
Milkfloats whine in electric.

My parka tired with old dirt.
The early moon carelessly ignored.
My hands are dark with print.

Nearly in another life
I discover the inner life of gates
and how to dance

around plants and bikes
and how to grow
into a morning.

Going to Church on New Year's Day

Slight as birds
Not in flight
But well placed,

Between hill and
Village; snow as it is:
Balanced, neutral.

Greyheads, silver-eyed
Drowning in tweed.
Beyond manshape

They ballet over ice,
Horse-footed,
Terse with God;

Wordless,
Sort of half alive,
Drawn against the white.

Table Dance

softporn saxophone;
botox for the soul,
strained faces only

held together by skin,
gluteal muscles for
nylonhearts and sweaty collars,

porcine, popeyed
each mouth fallen open
like a gallow`s trapdoor

the delight at a
big dame battleship,
built in stereo

that makes aftershave
boil under matching ties;
littlemen reduced to red.

The North is Winter

The North is Winter.
Ringing cold. Nameless stars.

A coastal trawler
With a ballast of dead souls.
Shaken into the waves.

The night tugs at my sleeve
As a child would so.
Nameless cold. Ringing stars. 
​

Autumn

Autumn is a frozen church
We wait at heavy doors
That smell of rust

Not a Moon cold enough
To be called heartless
Or breathclouds of old steam

More an estuary of
Dumped mist, afraid to ice,
The taste of wax on your lips,

The frame of hair round a 
Hatted face, our steps as slow
As if we tread water

You are ice and rain and
The first crystals and even
More than this, beside me. 

Widower

Knowing there are
many words for night;
night watch, nightshade, nightfall

but none for the space of
a halved bed, an envelope stretched,
flat with white; unslept in,

and hands devoid of
a trace of perfune or rest warmth,
a slight breath, a gentle curve.

Let him cherish the lost presence

of a drowned moon
of darkness long

of standing time.

After You Left

After you left, I fell asleep
Lost in a web on warm cotton and
Sudden space, stretching in your bed.
Your dream catcher turns in the light,
A trace of Eau-de-Cologne hangs in the air.
I find a poem by Rilke on your pillow,
An open book, almost lost by reading;
Ich finde Dich in allen diesen Dingen.
But then I lose myself again, outside
The traffic has stolen you like a thief.

Picture


​​
Read Leslie Philibert's profile   
  Go to page 1 of Leslie Philibert's poetry...

Fear of Trains

autumn rain is akin to black tea,
the burnt yellow of old growth watered,

a train shakes the fields, like an old carpet snapping,
birds shoot holes in the turbulent sky;
the world is split like an apple, your head inside a bell,

when it is over it is not over;
the air hums with steel,
too many eyes are in the undergrowth,
evening's calm as brittle as toffee,
shocked from coal and smoke, 
a heartbreath along rails.
​

Old

old is the smell of lavender, 
washed faces, the dust brown 
of waxed furniture, bouquets 

of veined hands that hide pearls 
in indian boxes, alongside cameras 
that fled across years, heavy-eyed 

then there is you, the way you change, 
you are half of these years, not just 
the ebb, but a wave never slight
​

Grey in One Line

Looking over the pale fields
and old woods, I recognise
                           this can not be the
                           consequence  of birth,

more a late push under winter mud,
as if I am as thin as cardboard,
                           one of no depth,
                           desolate as sleet.
​

Goodbye

Alone in a crowded room
                   she whispers through
                   her sharp cat`s teeth

Count the rest of your life
in days you do the same.
Imagine a space in the air
where I will never be.
​

Dark Church

angular,
behind black,
a suggestion of brick;

the spire moon
shadows the roots
under stars,

slight warmth
of sandstone
and ticking birds,

small movements
between gravestones
and curled brass ;

a dark box
of stone waiting
for the edge of light.
​

Kafka Turned Around

Dead as a fallen log
but turned into a human.

A gutbag of small pumps,
red rivers and spilled salt.

Drains, curves and arches
as in a Roman town.

Forced back into life,
stranger than an insect.

Less noble. Lock the door.

Day Sleeper

Lost out of the picture,
fallen out of life,
cut-eyed shut down

from all the cars and trains
and all this carrying and breaking
and lines of words without spaces.

You breathe softly, regular,
as if in a deep wood,
as paced as a slow piston

in exile to yourself,
a half life turned inside

as if the strings that
could lift you
hang loose in the sunlight.

Snow Train

As the snow is
tidal in the trees,
consider the tracks

and the dark tons
asthmatic with steam,
cold as the moon`s slight,

black as the stars are hidden,
perfect as a pulse of wheel;
dead crate of steel

that rests and waits

then moves by magic
quiet through the night
​

Garden Ship

The winter is enamel;
buckets of cold,
sodden pots of forgotten growth.

Snow ship.
Trees taut with
tackle of frost.

Earth hard as
the white sea,
adrift and lost

between seasons
made of ice and sorts
of rain,not going,

not sailing.
Dull and still

as December.

The Moor Girl

Feral as leather
Sculptured as a scarab
Curved as a burnt twig.

Asleep beyond the punishment,
Each tress solid with peat;
Flaxen as old corn.

Perhaps you softly breathe water
Under the door of the moon
Still as the night is rain.

Paradise

Let me be an old man in Anatolia
Resting on a white plastic chair,
Saintly in a starched white shirt
Drinking tea from a glass that has
Curves like a woman,watching
Children and traffic, nodding at
Shadows, a friend of dust and thin
Cats, weightless like a moth on
Running water, silent with the
Grace of ages, half asleep and wise.  

A Murdered Girl Sleeps Next to the Motorway

Eyes shadowed from stars
The not-quite silence rests

On your bleached cheek;
Trees adorn your faint skin.

The sun does what a sun does
And melts water on your face

A passing fox kisses your hand;
The moon lights or not;

All this as the busy race by
Under orphaned bridges, tearless,

You are lost for all the wrong reasons
But safe under loam
Sleeping in the ground like a blues.

The Soul

she looked puzled
and laid her book
between
the tea cups

and asked me
if the soul was
a woman
and I said
it is now. 

Still Life

dark fruit
hard and autumnal
beyond grey

be empty
to perfection
devoted to silence
in all things at home

Go to page 1 of Leslie Philibert's poetry

Comments?

***

​Thank you for visiting Tweetspeak VerseWrights.
© 2012-2018. VerseWrights. All rights reserved.:
Acrostic Poems
Ballad Poems
Catalog Poems
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems
Epic Poetry
Fairy Tale Poems
Fishing Poems
Funny Poems
Ghazal Poems
Haiku Poems
John Keats Poems
Love Poems
Math, Science & Technology Poems
Ode Poems
Pantoum Poems
Question Poems
Rondeau Poems
Rose Poems
Sestina Poems
Shakespeare Poems
Ship, Sail & Boat Poems
Sonnet Poems
Tea Poems
Villanelle Poems
William Blake Poems
Work Poems

To translate this page:
  • Welcome
  • All Poets
  • PoetryAloud
  • Inbox Peace
  • The Press
  • Journal Archives