Afternoon
The long, low, laboring growl of some military jet
casts sub-vocal shadows on slow forming thoughts.
Return from these glade reveries to realize you hear
their grumbling fading, smeared with horizon's rumble
where lorries judder along their civilized purposes,
as our pumping heart-blood shakes us, half asleep.
Cooking in the sun oven, unsweater and front
the glare, white cotton blinding as paper, that
a green ship float on magenta within heavied lids,
while forehead, cheeks, wrists, the backs of hands
would burn in your afternoon slump-sleep, soon enough.
These are the days, the pigeons are at pains to moot
it - so true, you already knew. So true. We all knew -
when breeze-touseled suns turn to frosted moons
overnight, gusts puffing them to diaspora dances;
white pin-cushion stubs with swept back sepals
left, until their drying stalks let towers fall,
when delicate pale-blue butterflies jiggle-fling
their flight-paths round the garden shed, and the first
wasp lurches about, giving us all the once-over.
........................
Evening (After Work)
The dappy haze* -
low sun glares and glazes.
Veils? If so, dysfunctional:
the sun-ball blares through gauzes,
light's cornucopia,
echoing from ruffling treetops;
heart beats hard in bone-cage.
Edging off behind the angle
of a roof
(the rustling shades of dusk are come),
yet sun's still keen to set on sharp, white fire
contrail after contrail -
jet following jet -
so high and silent,
bannering in pastel
above the white clouds and the smoky clouds
that close the West's proscenium
as the blackbirds play us in
from our midweek gardens: -
the toddlers, the mamas
and papas, the waddlers, poddlers,
'Winbad the Wailer',
and 'Zinbad the Zailor'*
.........................
*"Dappy Haze", you say and clink your glasses at this faux-Spoonerism.
*Zinbad the Zailor - from the end of Leopold Bloom's story in James Joyce's 'Ulysses'.
