Poems

Hesitating to join
his friends in the water
the last crimson leaf

Doubloons, fat pennants loll
and lay about on greeny fog,
and each twig tilts their shield-shades,
each rough-cut leaf, to interrupt
the broad blue back above.

Rain spoiled the fruit, they clot the nets –
these oblivious, night-black plums – dropped off
to bloom white mould, and shrink, and curdle
like so much pelagic mass hauled up
to dry in the drag-net off Nantucket or

Here, between the trunks in cemetery rows –
where glass-eyed flies once clung to fruit, 
and burst like dandelion heads as we passed
above the matted undulations of the grass
shot through with rusty pickets – jutting up

Like galleon bones, half sunk in silt  
and scoured pips – mis-sown by time to bare 
the porous ridges where their flesh hooked on
much as it does in us, still straining dark
and silent as a dragline in the empty sea, 

Or the grass that snarling wrecks the wall 
where a fig switch sits – snapped at the brittle joint, 
and a trough inclines the rain, whose skin of light
crosscut by fine black furrows of shade
is like the scale-wrapped flank of a fish.

I realise I am sweeping your grave, when – 
somewhere, a magpie sings, and I look up
through the naked lattice of the plum
and I see the sky is white, with one red edge,
like a segment from a peach.

The cattail bending,
hidden in the autumn wind.
A silent blackbird

The sky turns with crumpled leaves,
a flock of sparrows - tumbling.