TED
…as if the stone’s mind came feeling
A fantasy of directions
“Pibroch”)
it is a Winter truth:
every
library is
a mausoleum
every poem
a tomb
I think it must have been,
if memory serves, in
an old revamped cotton
trade building
that I sat amidst a throng
of hopelessly
eager Mancunians
devouring your every
brooding, grizzled,
Yorkshire syllable
seemingly homespun, yet
distinctly Oxbridge academic,
web of
sturdy twine
each thick, visceral, seed-
spilling phrase
falling like iron
parables
on every kind of ground
Mozart, shark,
hawk from a handsaw,
you were
obviously speaking
of yourself
as we all do
(be do)
metal scraping white ceramic
outside
I am released into the gravel air
pause
for a moment to think of Sylvia
****
old stone
older even than
the cathedrals of conquest
my ancestors
built everywhere
petrified
as to what I might find
I too fish for archetypes
rustic rivers, industrial canals
stuff down there for sure
with more
skewed history than
sets of pram wheels
dull green-gray these waters
of artifice
nothing gurgling yet
we
were no doubt told
means to
our emancipation
***
my grandfather buried here
think he
might have cultivated
a bit of interest
in the craft you
were here espousing
my boys
were the poets of his war
the ones
who died writing, or
returned
to ditch their medals
at the river bottom
common trade
common seam
painful
perpetual
clear as the first sharp
thought in the mind of a stone.
poems 2 die for 