and you say she’s gone for good

(for Jane Kenyon)

the cyclone
took your home and your
wits last monsoon but
that’s not true – you
were done after that
when she deserted you
on the patio overlooking
the avenue of poplars, tall,
spindly against the sky,
where you first touched
her lips with yours
and felt their tenderness
I follow you to
your hearth that glows
with butt-ends of cigarettes,
the potato peels you dump in
there every evening, and
the writing paper
turned to balls of crepe
she said she loved you
or didn’t she? but you
did and that’s all that
matters now when the only
sign of her is your face,
her wardrobe,
her scented handkerchief
(it was scented), and
that half-drunk tea-cup
…………………………..on the dining table

isle of wight & green onyxes

… jadeite, jasper,
amethyst, choral, lapis lazuli,
opal, opalite, sea-carved with careless
precision into angels, angelfish, angelus,
it’s an island of colour, colourful
bounty, contour, conformity, churches
washed by coastlines, quartz, agate,
paraiba tourmaline, perpetual skies

pulsing, pulsite, petalite, breathing
that bit more, breathing amazonite, and
the farther I draw the closer it grows,
growing out of the unhurry, its citrine
pools of sunwork, of waterways, shoals,
pike, perch, plaice, plankton, jellyfish,
feather-fungi, as though all this were
all there was to it all, and the gulls here,
rose quartz and mother-of-pearl,
unmanned, loping the airways, feeding
on shrimp, on weeds, tangled, turquoise,
sea-fires fronting ferries
farther and farther into firmaments of
blue sapphire, tanzanite oblivion, all

weekend I’ve been here,
driving from coast to coast in search
of fun and phenomena – lain low, in
hiding almost, waiting, afraid to stir,
be stirred, rippled to possibilities, my
ocean harp, my wrist, my palm, the crook
of a one lone finger, svelte, so svelte, so
supple, birthing waves, birthing auroras,
pale peridot, sometimes chrysolite,
sometimes sunshine sluicing coasts
of chrysocolla, apatite, granite,
nambulite, as though sandstoned and
washed off meaning and memory to
sapper greens, limes, lemonade, and

this time I left you behind when I
came, sepia, serpentine, shunted behind
bookcases, writing desks, discs, time-
machines, I deleted all texts from my
mobile, I kept the emails, the notes,
notebooks in word, threadbare, lapped
in, lap-topped, hidden in a folder I’ve
named ‘unnamed’ and shelved

laws of conservation

I’ve been in mourning forever,
grieving I’m told has a shelf

life, so does love, it decomposes
into something slighter,

something more human, the vestige
of loss taking different shapes

and forms with time, turning to
peat, soiling the palms for their

indiscriminate scooping and handling
of it all so you can’t tell one from the

other, it’s a process, this, of fertilising
angst until you’re done, vaporised

to fumes; our physics professor once told
us matter is never destroyed, grief is

matter, it’s much the same, I’m much
the same, I’m sat suspended mid-air in

the spaces somewhere between longing
and despair, their odours obdurate,

coiling about my person when I move
or lay myself down on the edge

of a day, it’s an act of pointless
ablution, this forgetting and forgoing

because it’s not water that must do
the trick of washing and waking here

but what remains of time and of me in
my constant cleansing of my crests

and contours, my neck, chest, midriff
down to my ankles that are rankling

still in bits and bobs of memory and
memorabilia that I sift, stubborn like

soot, like sorrow, hung in threads
and filaments and what was once

organic, in its purest form of anguish,
now maps marked in lines and

lineaments living inside me