Salt and Pepper
Here and there
White hairs appear
On my chest —
Age seasons me
Gives me zest —
I am a sage
In the making
Sprinkled, shaking
Salter's Gate
There, in that lost
corner of the ordnance survey.
Drive through the vanity —
two pubs and a garage — of Satley,
then right, cross the A68
past down-at-heel farms and a quarry,
Samba in the Sky
The poor have the best views,
Views sloping down to sea.
A green and yellow planet,
A blue band, rung with stars.
The poor have the best views.
You have to walk to get there.
Up three flights, narrow paths,
Houses rising steeply side to side.
No, no space for a car.
When the flag lifts, you see the coast:
Yellow curve of sand,
Framed by reaching branches.
Little humpbacked islands,
Soon they will drill for oil there,
Deep underwater. Once microscopic
Diatoms swarmed in salt, danced, died.
San Biagio, at Montepulciano
Columns, arches, vaults: how he knew
The ways you promise what you lack;
And that your bodies, like your souls,
Always slip from our grasping hands.
Space is such a lure... Swift to disappoint,
As they raise and topple clouds, the sky's
Architects still offer more than ours,
Who only build a scaffolding of dreams.
He dreamed, all the same; but on that day,
He gave a better use to beauty's shapes:
He understood that form means to die.
San Diego and Matisse
1. INSIDE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A TREE
Beautiful women in smoky blue culottes
lying around on fluffy pink pillows
beneath windows onto charming views,
sea views, seasonal leaves and trees.
Inside is outside and outside inside.
Smell of saltwater swimming in the room.
2. OUTSIDE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A ROCKING CHAIR
Sanctuary
You who I don’ t know I don’ t know how to talk to you
— What is it like for you there?
Here... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship —
The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear.
Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes.
But they will not be mine;
to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices —
What are you afraid of?
Sand Flesh and Sky
Our ropes are the roots
of our life. We fish
low in the earth,
the river beneath runs through our veins,
blue and cold in a riverbed.
When the sun comes up,
the moon moves slowly to the left.
I tie the logs and limbs together,
holding them in place.
The ocean beats them
smooth like rock.
Here my sense of time is flat.
I find in a strip of damp sand
footprints and marks of hands,
and torn pieces of flesh.
Night is a beast.
The tide moves, gushing
back and forth.
Sanoe
Listen, Sanoe
Dewy lehua bud
Here I am
Waiting for your voice.
The answer comes
I am satisfied
Softly, sweetheart
You excite my whole being.
My body is waiting
Waiting there in yearning belief
How are we to fulfill
The desire of our thoughts?
Calling to you, my water lily
Budding for the two of us
Here close by is a compliment
The manu comes to deliver.
The Queen is listening
The aroma of the scents comes together
Mixes and rises upward
So similar, so alike.
Santa Fe Trail
I go separately
The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me
ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands
it is the dungaree darkness with China stitched
where the westerly winds
and the traveler’ s checks
the evensong of salesmen
the glistening paraphernalia of twin suitcases
where no one speaks English.
I go separately
It is the wind, the rubber wind
Satire III
Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids
Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids;
I must not laugh, nor weep sins and be wise;
Can railing, then, cure these worn maladies?
Is not our mistress, fair Religion,
As worthy of all our souls' devotion
As virtue was in the first blinded age?
Are not heaven's joys as valiant to assuage
Lusts, as earth's honour was to them? Alas,
As we do them in means, shall they surpass
Us in the end? and shall thy father's spirit
Meet blind philosophers in heaven, whose merit