Find

Mind can’t make up its mind,

Nor the wind-up clock wind,

Nor the found object find.

All comes back on its selves,

Books returned to bookshelves.

As no star eternally burns,

We find all we will learn —

We’re just one eternal return.

Word

Sound and type are blurred

And the meaning is absurd.

Because it is only one word,

We can ignore it with impunity;

To do so might be no pity.

And yet, the only of its kind,

Without it language would be blind.

I cannot easily say it;

To try would betray it.

I don’t mean as in reveal,

But to render it less real.

It lies in its tomb,

A yellowed volume.

Unearthed, it will bloom.

Image

I found the image in the attic,

In the half-light blurred, static,

Like a votive, intensely vatic.

In a shadow box, five white stones

All shaped like finger bones

Arranged in a question mark,

A gesture beckoning a dark

Something beyond conceiving

Into the emptiness of believing.

I took it and nailed it to a wall

Downstairs, only to watch it fall,

Its glass crack, the stones scatter.

I think they no longer matter,

But I’m wrong. I see them still,

Years later. They won’t, and will.

They're like ghosts no ghost can kill.

 

Echo

To the echo the mirror said,

“You repeat until you are dead,

While I’m an eternal ‘instead,’

Light’s reversal that cannot fade.”

The echo replied, “fade, fai, daid.”

Night fell — only light was afraid.

Hour

For Lucien Stryk

A strange word — an our

And a silent H that lours

Over us, a hidden power

Giving us us and taking

Us away — asleep — awakening.

Curse

Can a country be under a curse, 

A few words of malignant verse

Chanted inside a racing hearse?

To hell with superstition!

No man, crowd, or institution

Has turned our nation sour.

The Mind has forgotten the hour

Can grow late

Growing hate,

Like an ocean filling with plastic,

Leaving life crippled and spastic.

The curse is proliferating thought

That the future can be bought

And as quickly taken away —

Only the loudest given a say.

Will the worst curse have its day?

Whale

From infancy, we’re in its guts,

The beggars and the golden Tuts,

Until, when the Whaler cuts

Through blubber and sets us free,

We dive and thrash the freezing sea.

Decades on we still remember:

We were like insects in amber,

Protected, even transported,

Blind, yes, our hearing distorted

By the aggravated rumble

Of its great heart. We were humbled,

Every one of us alone.

We each had our one whale to own,

Yet we escaped to live or drown.