Cataract
.
Only a small cut in your eye. You stay awake throughout. A rush of
water, waterfall, downpour: (loud & sheer; Cascade) … Niagara
where once I travelled in a Hillman, nursing number one. I
didn’t know she was going to leave so soon.
Blink for me my consultant says. You mustn’t move. We use very
sharp tools. The big black ultrasound stands statuesque to pound
a sequence of his devising with geometries of flashing light. Like
a photographer wild with zoom, he ships each message through
his fingertips, sucking the small dead fish from my eye,
dissolving it like a memory, leaving its sheath behind.
I focus on the moment of depletion, my eye enormous and still,
a bloated sleeping seal the water swills over. He pops a stranger
in. And there is water, Niagara sheets my cheek, pouring down
the walls of my mind.
Distance distorts. Surgery distorts. But bless technology, I’ve an
eye to weep, and my seeing lens comprehends that some leave
sooner than you want them to. I hold my child close,
the missing one.
Under the Radar 27, 2021
The Guest Room
An owl rips this space
we keep for family and friends who
race the Atlantic
in carbon-spitting planes,
whose nakedness wakes unused sheets,
who cram the room with travel-bags, computers, cards of pills
and sprawls of swimming gear.
Their darkglass summer eyes
fill, multiply our lives.
In this room,a room that eats the setting sun,
there’s stillness to be filled.Night is like wide water.
Faces flicker.
Black speaks back from beyond the owl,
behind the strangeness of our time.
Desire is fill of endless distances.
The North, January 2021.
Sunday Mornings
You place the pieces on the table
pendulum rocker-arm weights escape wheel
use a toothbrush frisk the cogs
There is a limit to tightening the time
a risk of breaking
The grandfather should not be tilted
sideways backwards or forwards
It must stand as if it supports the sky
IS&T, March 2021
Anthologies include: Skein, Templar, 2014; Peleton, Templar, 2013; Running Before the Wind, (Grey Hen Press) 2013; Soundswrite Anthologies (Soundswrite Press, 2005 & 2006,) Poetry Wivenhoe (2008); Light Unlocked, Christmas Card Poems, (Enitharmon, 2005)