Looking Up

Stars are numbered precisely.
For the ones that promise most
we dream a band of homely planets.
The worst burn, burn, void matter.

*

Before the snow, the moon had a crown
(vacant circuit). Then, gilded cars and heads.
Now it’s all water and spray,
streetloads for walkers to stretch their steps on.

*

We are crystal at the river’s edge.
We refract everything in the lit sky,
scatter colours in the runnels of new-builds
where all the blinds are drawn.

*

Stars are numbered precisely. They are gas and fusion.
Their dimensions are all formulae. Their deaths
are terminology. Their distances are a line of noughts.
They seem snow, love.

 

See also Lights in the Sky

Angle of Incidence

At midnight I fell through the tree.
I had my reasons. I was street light
and light’s nature is to find its way
moving blankness back, so any eyes
coming home at that recoloured hour
would see me pass straight through,
a beam between knuckled twigs
touching the road around two lovers
stopped at the point of light
falling. It was for them I chose
this time, this place for my descent.
Otherwise, what purpose light?

 

Read at the wedding of Caroline and Prad, 2014.
See also Three Liberations.

Terrain

 

Your eyes can pour fields, crowds of sparrows
clattering and turning out of the hedges.
Your marsh can spread behind bedroom doors,
populous with wings, stamens, antennae,
anthers in pools of blooms. I will inhale
all the pollen. Forestier of buttocked hills,
nights of you are musked with animal treads.
Sometimes a deer looks in from the road.
Sometimes a bee rests its flight on the centre
of your tongue. Though I daren’t risk slow-moving
rivers, in leaf-lipped ponds I go adrift,
unfeathered but warm enough in the beams
of cloudlight spread across the rolling
weather of your face. Don’t close your eyes, not yet.

 

 

See also Cezanne on the Pennine Way