Tonight in the wind

There is nothing like the dispassionate force of a forty mile and hour gale coming off the sea. In the daytime it beats up the waves into foam, blinding white on the deep Prussian blue of the water. At night it has the monotonous roar of a furnace, black noise, it must be, rushing through the cove and bending our 100 ft spruce, testing its shallow roots every time it blows like this. And to think that there might be people at sea on a night like this, chopping ice off rigging, hurrying with stiff fingers to re-fasten everything the wind has torn loose: I pray for them, even though I'm not a church-going person. Our house feels firm, made of big blocks, founded on stone, with good storm windows, but I am daunted by that wind. I will not be going out much until it stops. When I do put on my heavy coat, gloves and scarf to fetch wood, or get the mail, I can feel the wind strip the power out of my body like a vampire. When I return it takes an hour to get warm again. I long for the simple spring sunshine that tips us over the edge of summer– not so much even to make me take off my coat, but just to know that there exists a force that will not kill me if I am not careful. Good night. Stay warm.

Some new poems

Snowy Day #10

Flurries continue.
Mist fills the window
blots all edges.
Sea-quick rocks somnolent
weed relaxed.

Inside
reclined
dogs in their beds twitch and sigh
radio buzzes lightly
sotto voce names of no relevance.

Cheeks bloom with blown snow
renewed with cold we pulse, lively.


Granite Pier #2

The low moon sings cold pearl and ivory fretwork
huge over the horizon’s tiny lights.
The anchored schooner frozen on silver ripples
in a spacious night, your absence almost tangible.

The shaft of moonlight stretches seaborne
from infinity, a quivering division:
the town there, there the eternal
ocean and a night empty of birds.

Kingdom of silence whose citizen’s luminous
skins slide below the waterline,
a silent polity, far from my individual isolation.
Busy bunching crowds doing deals over the pale sand

teeming among tall kelp, swirling shoals beset
by what emotions I cannot know, any more than they
know my solitariness, or could bear it, lost without a crowd.
I lack only one companion, swimming hand in hand,

a stream of bubbles in our wake. We become all eyes
beneath the water: seeking lavender fans, scarlet fire
coral, needle fish, crab pincer, ribbon worm undulating
a sinuous path in mid-water. We devour them

with our eyes and return grudgingly to the warmth,
sitting in the cockpit, in the punctual glory of sunset,
we recollect and record that other life, sharing it.
But here the moon shaft divides you, in danger of your life,

from me, impotent and yearning. I journey in the darkness
a pair of wide wings gliding close to the polished granite
black surface of the sea forgetting how I started up
from the grass this morning at dawn, wings frantic flapping

upwards, away, anywhere. Now I travel
with a purpose, scouting the way you will go, assured
that it will be a quiet road invisible to all except those
who travel it, becoming each moment more a part of all

the universal teemimg emptiness: the impartial,
indifferently equal spread of stuff,
each atom spread out to be recombined
to create new forms from endless chaos.


Autobiography

Of course, England was another country
then. I inhabited it as a nomad,
hitchhiking, carrying only a duffle bag
and that contained everything I had,
a change of underwear, a raincoat,
a bag of face paint, money, a slice
of Afghani black in my Gran’s big silver locket,
hidden in plain sight, on a green velvet choker,
from my policeman father: I was afraid
that it would warm on my skin
and that he would smell it if he got close,
but he never did. On my travels,
nothing shielded me from lechery or shame
I could be seen at the side of the road, a long skirt
swirling in the back draft from the traffic,
inviolable, with my heart open and earnest,
knowing that I was walking on glass,
that nothing but a thin pane stood
between confidence and desperation.

I accepted hospitality, sleeping on floors,
waking to cold water bathrooms,
wrapped in a blanket on the dubious linoleum,
half-silvered mirror over the sink, a noisy
chain-bidden flush, I crept out into dawn
with air that was almost clear,
free to walk anywhere in the open city,
rummaging in bookshops, museums,
flea markets and junk shops, walking the locked
gardens of Mayfair and Shepherd’s Market,
enclaves brimming with lilac, Soho with narrow
alleys inviting a city rat into another part of the maze,
believing that there was a revelation around each corner.

Journeying promises everything.
No-one knows your name. No school freinds undermine
your lyric with reminders of your untidy origins.
I met many strange creatures in that Terra Incognita.
There were wild centaurs that struck out of the dark
vanishing by morning, hermaphrodites, lesbian
nuns who were prepared to break their vows,
tutelary dwarves, women who lived to paint
and men who danced to live, fading aristocrats who
needed to do nothing at all. Above all, musicians,
the attendants of musicians, the paramours of musicians
looking for a shoulder to cry on, a patient ear
to endure their dependencies, their anorexia,
to shop with them in Kensington and Petticoat Lane.
There were adult children, exiled from Hampstead,
more beautiful than I could imagine, who wrote
haiku about enlightenment on bathroom walls.
They were so pure that I ached to corrupt them,
show them just a little of the place from which I came,
with the damp, the smell of decay, the inescapable cold,
ineradicable hunger. I wanted their foreheads
to wrinkle just a little, their eyes to be ringed lightly
with black, their skin paler and less smooth:
for otherwise how could I love them?