Wednesday, January 22, 2014

VENICE, CAMPO SAN NICOLO' DEI MENDICOLI.


A warm winter Sunday.
Breaths in almost
suspended droplets.
Muffled silence by the church,
the Sunday silence of dampened steps,
air testing its own hazy indulgence.
I sweat after the walk. Sirocco fills me.
The swollen sky’s cheeks.
Here the city ended once,
stretched in front there was only
the lagoon expanse
in patches of sandbars.
Bare flatness
and flourishes of ripples.
And oars dipping in
and the boats’ wood whining
in the clouds maybe more than now
slow, big and palpable.
In silver grey
just after the rain.
Something merging
with the spreading forth
of a birth, the utterly strange
and the utterly familiar.

And now I know
I could perspire myself
into what’s next.

Monday, January 6, 2014

WINTER GARDEN


Earth carrying the silence inside and beyond.
It’s a rainy winter afternoon,
the turf spongy underfoot,
the trees have been pruned,
branches become thick stubs the colour of smoke,
neat and naked in the sky’s pearly wait,
tall, lush trees that had been towering
beyond the roof, their bareness now,
their countenance, like wrists and fists
pointing at some high dot in the distance,
calls us back to order, necessity,
the spare tune of roots and soil.
Tall trees. And the new ones
just planted, the cherry-tree, the fig, the apricot,
with all their promising, budding future
now just thin, flimsy things, a silhouette of twigs,
I gaze at the grey earth mound with at the centre
the hole they have been stuck in.

The rain falls,
the vast and close stare,
breath of air.
It will be evening soon, then
the future.
I won’t see many of its fingers
but some are already here, just underfoot.
And low clouds over the silence.