Shinning the stalk of a white flower

In stops and starts like an elderly beachcomber

After coconuts, tiny head swivelling

As it munches pollen, legs notched for purchase,

Does not crawl, but clings to my knuckles

As I place it on the edge of a petal

Of a pink Jubilee rose

Where it hangs like a jewel

From a pierced lip until it whirrs

Helicopter rotor blades of wings and soars.

September

An apricot left unpicked in August

Has wrinkled on its twig so that its skin,

Coloured like a sun squinted at through dust,

Possesses the folds and contours of a brain.

A Camberwell Beauty, old, to judge by wings

With frayed yellowing edges like worn silk, floats

Down every ten minutes and unrolls a tongue,

Curved like a long black eyelash, to the apricot,

Which must be fermenting as the insect's flight

Becomes unsteadier and unsteadier.

It is the soul of a Chinese poet

Whose verse and life were always much too sober,

Unwilling to enter that space, which is neither

This life nor the next, after many glasses

Of chrysanthemum wine. Now desire

Compels it to suck at a sweet lack of neatness

Until a disorder in the air shakes the tree

And all the poets rise; Camberwell, Peacock,

Red Admiral, towards an assembly

Of birds whose songs and appetites now unlock. 

The Blue Slug

A blue slug, the colour of biro ink,

Makes its way down the side of a rotting log

And slides past the fire I've cultivated.

Is this the month that slugs and snails change sex,

This blue a final blue of indecision?

I don't inhabit the kingdom of the slug

And am, alas, only and forever male

With worse indecisions all of my own.

The sun is setting without hesitation,

So colour and temperature reverse.

Will the White Admiral, mostly brown,

That seems to think my cabin belongs to him

And sips sweat from the bald patch on my head,

Now expand and reappear as an angel,

A lord of light with a flaming sword

Saying, "Welcome home, Son of Adam?"

Boots

We carried a treasure without price

On that long retreat from Moscow,

But the blizzard caught and froze us

So our legs stood like fence posts until Spring.

Then a wanderer found and pulled us

So easily from ankles withered and dry.

He sang the songs God made for our redemption.

Though before he could write them down he died.

We were on the legs of a revolution

That babbled truth to a field of hares

And on those of a boy deaf and blind

Who received messages from the stars.

Now we're empty, our stitching rotted,

We'd fall apart before we reached the gate.

So we stand in darkness long out of mind

While behind us a window blossoms with light.

Photograph courtesy of Shamil Khairov

Dialectical Materialism

This is the shop window

Into which you gazed long before we met.

This is the daily view of the world

Which glimmered behind your eyelids

Long before we kissed then sat

Talking all day how we just might,

How we just might, how we just might.

This is the footwear, fur-lined,

For a cold May Day parade.

These are the shoes and boots you considered,

Pouted at their lack of style, then set aside

For dreams of Italian heels,

Something a girl of taste should really need,

Should really need, should really need.

This is the face, now wrinkled leather under glass,

Once so persuasively talking.

These are the consequences, so cheap, so

   gimcrack,

Though to admit them is, of course, shocking

Despite the secret catalogues, gifts from overseas

And the girls who sing, "These boots are made for walking,

Are made for walking, are made for walking.

One of these days …"