Tuesday, 9 January 2018

Upright Ape at Inverloch – summer 2018:


Standing here at the edge,
the wind throwing grains of sand into my flesh
as if I am the vacant space the universe
explodes upon,

the sound of the ocean,
unending howl of creation
as land is torn, broken down,
reformed in places unseen.

I remember when I was sixteen,
innocent except in the mastery of the pain
that sixteen years had yielded,

beauty seen
as if from behind a window;
always there and not held,
touched but swift to fade,
like a snowflake beneath the heat
of skin and desire.

The water burying my feet in homage
to time’s unending carving of the tomb
for flesh and bone to be hollowed out and found
in some distant time, perhaps then lifted
to some stranger’s lips, lung-wind
blown to make music of all that I was once
and has been forgotten.

Life — the ocean of individual droplets,
useless unless considered
as a single form coming and going,
changing the world, reorganising it,
breaking it, and — if wisdom wins —
repairing ourselves and the destruction
we bring for some future generation
of bone blowers, their hands, each of five digits,
cradling all that we have held.


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