Moving On

Moving On

The road has become her passage, dark and placid
Thrusting along behind a vehicle unseen
I race in his wake and the absence of traffic
Trailing at night a love coursing the curves at speed

Hardly slowing, she or me - but never getting close
And maintaining a distance - as if I am strung
On a length of rope from a vast, fast-trailered boat
In the serpentine tarmac channel by Loch Earn

Daring me to draw ahead of her on the straight
She tacks sharply, bouncing wildly with each slight turn
Till lurching once more into the opposing lane
She is taunting me again with her angled stern

In all of this space to brake hard should it founder
I'm content at the end of my nautical line
When he cuts dead his motor, dragging to anchor
And abandoned by bouyancy, I pass her by


Celt

Awakening with me
Half-forgotten glimpses
Uninhibited sprites
Beneficent spirits
Rise in my unconscious
Unsettled as darkness
Now moving on to morn
Night for precious minutes
Delays their emission
The outcome still in thrall
To that remote space
Fast declining, yet recalled

Blinking back the new day
With closure as reward
Beneath their skinny sheets
My eyes are loathe to part
With the admittance dreams
Lift of their own accord
Yet vapours, they vanish
Extinguishing the heart
Dawn raiding with soft rain
Lightening evidence
From her brighter presence
To shade and remnant.


Lesser Town (Three Down)

Three from four is one
In the Mala Strana
Letting her formulae
Fall away from me
Easily as a magician
Or mathematician
I am forced to revisit
Unwelcome calculation

Three is the realised sum
For what was impossible
Now she is beyond my arms
Proves four-ways divisible:
Her love, her image of me
My vision of her, all gone
I have reached the singular loss
Three from four is one.


A Welsh Memory

We rose on Crib Goch then on such a high
That sky that morning fleet but disarrayed
Ridged cloud from each direction swept aside
Surprised as I as heavens snapped awake

Now through a leafless tree against the moon
I recall your shapes that finely bled away
As the distant orb of earth's creation
Shines through the lifelines held aloft to die

In dim capillaries to a distant world
I see in branches feeding out a sky
The thin pulse of life through so little wood
As history is felled, her branches cut