Meridian, sneeze
Pollen you could cut with a knife
grassheads everywhere opening
puffling like steam
engines, like pipe smokers
puffling clouds
then the trees breezily
& the leaves
fluttering, glistening
in the glow
of the bright orb
up there
still
utterly still
& silent
not for us such
stillness
hurtling
always
moving
in patterns
predictable
or not
stillness down here
is synchronous movement
carried together
in the moving
air, the clouds
of pollen
Blurrily, no subject
So the soft warm air climbs up
from the south again & warms us up with it.
The oscillations of a newly purchased
electric fan cause the same air
to throb & waver while the leaves
of a small fig tree wither on a shelf nearby.
I consider what it would be like
to be a growing seed in this economy.
You were fretting about that,
revolving like a heat dome over it,
blood spots at the corners of your mouth.
I say to myself, I suffer too many ghosts
for this lark of murky inwardness; but you,
you were a flower. Outside me.
I wanted to be an object for you.
A bad moon rising
with ropes
I could carry it, that moon
on my back, the lesser light
with ropes
shall I stay? what’s left to say of
the mystery of love
the mystery of others
the mystery of sorrow
the mystery of beauty in sorrow
the mystery of the night, mystery of the dawn
the shadows fall to the floor & play
there as the branches sway backwards & forwards
in a soft melancholy of form
& I am wading in an indigo light
think upon the ordinary things
they swirl in intimate textures about your head & feet
shall I stay? do you remember
the broken times, like me
with longing like a glassy flame
when I would open to you like the rose?
Witch-hazel / Goatsucker
Sounds like great sighs echo
around the boulevards of early summer,
the artifice placed in question.
What is it you’re scared of, I wonder.
Are we not both tickled by fear,
fraying at the edges in the building heat?
The waters come only in storms lately,
falling on the dry cracked ground
seething with anger. Fickle image
of a fickle heart. Nothing is ever
finished. Place my hand in the small
of your back, again. I guess.
The trackways of the divining soul
are terracotta, brittle for spring,
winding & endless. The nightjar’s
eerie calling rising & falling
in the half-light. Desire shrouded
amidst this pageantry of lights.
Semblance, honeysuckle
With too much to lose, not enough to carry on
we are carried along gently, like babes
in a stream of warm impermanence
lukewarm maybe, observing, on the banks
landmarks & discerning with our ears
the amusing sounds of birds & other animals
discerning the times but distracted, sometimes
by familiar tasks
a brief counting task, a task of naming
tasks of collection & division
distracted, sometimes, by the keen little joys
of leaves, the silent parades of clouds
passing jubilantly overhead.
Precisely what is it that we are meant to be doing here?
Loving each other?
Remembering, from within, what matters?
Forgetting all that?
Fighting over scraps?
Accumulating, dreamily, then wallowing like brutes?
Fretting over justice? Tending to the earth?
Burning it all up since, after all, why not?
I look up at the hills, under cloud;
it is so dark now, over yonder, to the south.
It will rain soon.
I am fearful of the dark.
Many things are discovered in the doing of them,
many things go missing in the drift,
many things are lost in the slow-moving mists.
When we realise how simple it might have been
we will not forgive ourselves.
Simon Ravenscroft lives in Cambridge, England. He is a Fellow of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. He has published poems recently in Osmosis Press, The Penn Review, Apocalypse Confidential, Full House Literary, Eratio, RIC Journal, Swifts & Slows, La Piccioletta Barca, Burning House Press, Red Ogre Review, and other places.
High Horse 