Haikus (2014-16)
turning a rock in
the garden, I smell childhood
where the worms live
we hang over the
bridge ~ red leaves and river pass
under our shadows
a smooth beach stone falls
open: a gift inside – a
mini mountainscape
a tiny bubble
leaves the pale green stem’s side and
floats to the surface
the blue gentian that
that was pressed inside this book in
nineteen sixty-one - it’s gone.
look, the garden’s all
blue now: it’s late enough to
put the sprinkler on
blackberries so tight the
bramble comes with them when tugged
and more fall free
the glorious waste:
all those petals and patterns
that never get seen
with long sticks, my girls
stir the brown stream, breaking
the top into silver
a sky abacus:
clouds on vapour trail rods count
years spent : years to live
On this spinning blue-
green orb, in this time and place,
I meet you. Awesome.
Don't move the white vase
of roses; their flowers come
undone at a breath.
glance and see lichen
growing, glacier pace, on
a bare hawthorn tree
Bitter, the ring of
white blood she found in the snapped dandelion stem.
better, perhaps, to
have used the map; but we’d have
missed the wild garlic
bright green verticals
holding up old mown cuttings
make a small-thing space
December noon: thin
flames in the family hearth:
tissue paper warmth
her penultimate
day: hand as smooth as a child’s
and cool, but not cold
apart / together:
starlings, in a dark plume, fly
the broken pier
high tide takes her last
shot at goal: flings foam, stones,
and weed at the dry sand
the marks he made with
wet thumb on warm stone dried too
fast for me to read
summer runs over our
thumbs and wrists and down our arms
in gold peach juice
view raw now, beyond
my back fence, where five poplars
used to catch the light
worker bee on a
teazel’s lilac crown: her own
majesty unknown