Selected poems
Under the tree
You dare me to take a bite.
In the seconds before I act I think
of my father working in his blue overalls
covered in sawdust; the smells of my childhood:
rusty nails, thick tar and hardened peat.
He is probably somewhere up to no good
grafting away on some new project
I will never understand — with blokes
I know who scorn my love of art.
My earliest memory of him
and I together was in a dank and seedy bar
in a part of town scarcely known.
His hands seemed to be the size of comets
and he was drinking and he was laughing
though I cannot remember what advice he gave.
I remember being sat by an orange fire
under thick oak beams; I recognised the smoke
that filled the room as illusive and white.
The sun is shining and you look beautiful
and you take the first bite; your teeth split the seal
and the fruit hisses as the juice sprays your plump lips.
You throw the fruit high up into the air and as it falls
it's received by my cupped and shaking hands.
Contemporary Georgian
I sit in this café surrounded by tourists,
affluent locals spoiling their offspring with scones.
A tramp wanders by pleading; Please, any spare change?
I offer him a pinch of Virginian tobacco,
grateful he accepts, licks his lips and moves on.
I pity his situation: missing teeth, soiled shirt and matted hair.
In the west of England the sun illuminates
the yellow of the Bath stone, and instantly I feel wealthier.
At the entrance of the Abbey, a stone's throw away,
sculptured angels climb Jacob's Ladder; their trajectories
have been fixed for centuries. I presume it is Lucifer
who, positioned near the top, chose to descend.
My latte arrives delivered by a lithe waitress I know
I'll tip generously. She says she's studying
Classical Translation at Edinburgh — similar aesthetics —
before slinking away. My eyes widen as I read:
The Abbey houses thousands of caskets, each full of dust
beneath the floor, where people kneel and pray.
I contemplate my death and envisage my father
on the wooden skiff he built, launching my ashes
into a calm breeze, his face masked with salt tears,
decades of memory. The marine life would mistake me
for plankton; I'd be consumed, excreted from sensitive gills.
I'd prosper on the bottom of the ocean floor.
Laozi
I speak to the rulers, not the ruled,
when I promote profound Inactiveness.
What crop will ever be sustainable
without adopting childlike innocence?
Grand notions of legacy and conquest
should be written with one's staff in a pool
to remind oneself that it's meaningless
to conquer kingdoms, to hoard