numa

Confiteor: St Michael’s Oxford

I am a worse ruin

than this church will be

I am less true

more false

than its God

I am more doubtful

than its Saviour

I am even less certain

than its Resurrection

I am less credible

than its scriptures

I make less sense

than its teachings

I am vainer

than its monuments

and panoply

I lack the humility

of the Lady chapel

I mean nothing

compared with

 its lily-spliced

Christ

alone in it

at this moment

I am all its Sin

and the proof against it

could I be

its hope

and promise

of victory

mighty angel

for whom this church

was named

great Michael

be vanquished

the dragon in me

St Michael’s, Oxford

24 July 2010

they dropped lakes

of burning glass

my wife and I

held our son close

we burned a moment

and were gone

pity those who

did not burn enough

24 April 2009

the constant treeline

only steeples tower

 

ropewalk hedgerows twine

barbs where robins bower

 

which way streams incline

s’told when downpours scour

 

Domesday Book designed

landscapes for prone power

 

reams of leaves define

where the woodlice cower

 

cross some stile and find

another page endowered

 

contrails now align

to amortize the hour

 

Gladstone Rd

Dunedin NZ

October 2005 

twilight’s a hedge

without an edge

the grass is high

evenings long

paths thru them lie

parted wrong

trodden down fast

when first trespassed

darkness throngs

the trails alleged

7 June 2008

Blackwells Oxford

the rain’s hiss on the green dark

of the arboreal bore

wound out ambulatory

in barbed coils across the field

once we had run out of world

in between pent villages

nobody walks around in

ceases to a soft sizzle

until the pylon’s crackling

announces it had straddled

the ear all the time or else

some stranger won’t move along

plunks into the pond-scum mind

28-29 April 2008 

overhead bridge view

from across eight tracks

the door ajar on

an abandoned day

of burnt-off fog and dreamt spire

lead and stone clearer

than smudging chalklines

up the blueboard sky

than the sharp bed of

the occasional railway

15 February 2008

night passed like a snail
over my window

the panes were covered with slime
dawn it recoils back in its shell

some bird can pick open the day
and swallow all night.

Hinksey, Oxford
16 January 2008

we can still know
the galaxy  
flurries like snow

stars are plankton
black holes feed on

whose night are we long
in the past sky gone

Blackwells Oxford
2 December 2007

poems are
squashed fly

buzzing
on a mirror

we can wipe
off our face

11 May 2007

winter wood thyrsis
beat the wind’s time

ambers arsoned
to ember

canker caissons
dismembered

rage agiaries
upended

the year’s phoenix
all rendered

downdraught-flexed copses
back on the climb

28 March 2007

NB “beat” is the past tense not the imperative.