Poetry

Flagged to a halt by a woman in boots
and an oiled canvas coat, we stopped for her

orange flag on the highway yesterday in
the first flurries of the season and watched

I’m docked at a lake that

the people don’t attend. 

Machete on my hip to 

make a devil cough up 

I was participating fully in Life,

or so my calendar said,

when I had the spiritually extravagant

gift of being heart-struck,

standing before a painting.

Give me memories as 

slow to leave as snails. 

In foreign    and perhaps 

fragile years    I’ll still be able 

               I wanted to make a gothic of it all:
the trees on the slope where the island dipped
               into the sea, their weird kinks & angles;

She has drawn them disembarking a sky-blue bus,
fresh from the bombing of Al Hajar. Some stumble
in the red-blobbed orchard, their hair shedding dust.

I’m thinking of how mushrooms will haunt a wet log like bulbous ghosts; 
of how a mushroom may be considered a travesty of a flower

It wasn’t so much that we burnt tires, releasing a toxic stew of nasties,
or that each Eleventh Night, as a spat crescendoed, some fella got battered 

Our love it lives at 6.3 degrees.
I stooped to measure it inside a dream.
A meager distance. Not the moon in apogee.