Meditation Shrine

Between the vast landscape

And the tiny flower

And further memorabilia

A flame flickers

That is

Between

The vast Hebridean landscape

With land, loch and mountain

As photographed in years gone by

And the tiny flower, captured

By camera

On the roadside beside the bog

There is a glass vase

With a votive candle

Also, between the large pebbles

There is a thin slice

Of fossilised ammonite

Which was

A gift for services rendered

In the furtherance of publication

Of that lady’s poetry collection

 

This, Or That

In this town, whose streets

I neither own nor roam

Unlike that village

Which really was my place

In this time, whose age

I both fear and crave

Unlike my youth

Lived out for all to chase

In this light, whose darkness

Checks all progress made

Unlike the dawn

More certain in its gaze

In this line, whose edge

In truth approaches plain

Unlike the poet

Who wanders in malaise

In this end, a stuttering fall

Which maybe came too too soon

Unlike the comet

Whose sparkles our spirits raise

 

Ninety-Degree Shift

These are warm-up exercises

In preparation for

Or as a means of delay

For the forthcoming grand entrance

When I will turn the book on its side

To write in landscape form

A set of poems to be printed

In limited, limited editions

That is how I started

Back in the day before self-publishing was rife

To return is not always nostalgia

Nor is one always to write in the portrait form

Such absence of technical manipulation

As might be found in serious study rooms

You know the kind of place, criticised

For enjambment, for not knowing where lines end

To fast forward is not always science fiction

Or modernist futurism by any other name

To loop the tape loop is still to loop

Repetitive writing is similar, if not exactly the same

 

Organised Observation

I have to rearrange the Batik on the bannister

In the process, but then firmly fixed

I see a space for a row of my pictures

So self-evident in the course of natural selection

Will I get the idea past management

Who I do know rather cares

For the new desk’s location

Although it was ridiculed at first

I have kept the penny coin (mock copper)

Which sits atop the banister post

What might be its provenance I ask myself

As I take a moment to look out of the window

I bought a shade with a tea candle from Ropewalk

Which says it is not to be left unattended

It is as a counterbalance, to the natural light

Though not yet seen to, or at, its full potential

 

Observatories

From Scorpio to Aquarius

Among the planets, among the stars

Talk of the multifarious

To banish the witness, to spare the scars

The PGS physics class

Never did go to Jodrell Bank

And on that one visit to Kelly College

The giant telescope was out of bounds

This then is almost to the limit

Of my knowledge of astronomy, or astrology

Except for Bridget Riley’s poem The Planets

Which I recorded live at Emerson College

I have looked out at the moon

I even sang along with The Waterboys song

I saw the crescent, you saw the whole of the moon

Long before our meeting of the signs

Did I though not begin with the zodiac

An altogether more debatable subject matter

Where you can always find the good, or bad stuff

If your thought processes are sufficiently flexible