sometimes means

you’re home.

Night Bus to Richmond

Night Bus to Richmond

Suddenly it’s upon me,

scything the night

like a red knife,

three passengers,

specimens in vinegar glow.

On the upper deck

a woman is reading Catch-22,

the dream having erased

the cold rubber floor mats,

the diesel rattle,

a gray December night

a man walks up a hill

toward home.

On Love

On Love

If wind asked permission

we might wait and listen

as if night stopped its blue

curtain and wheat bent without scattering

its hope of what happens in the dark,

and happens by accident.

Wimbledon

Wimbledon

Walking on the common

in heavy blue light,

she says to him the time for children,

were there ever one, has

passed, that would be that, and

two close calls aside,

she proves to be right, and the years

pass with happiness

too great to be measured, because

one does not measure what feels

endless, just as this land was once

a queen’s private hunting estate,

everything around it Hers too;

there were no boundaries,

until a village grew to service

Her horses and

part-time tailors, the cobblers and

surgeons and cooks needed

to properly entertain guests, and

then the uninvited came,

took what was not desirable, built

their limestone houses,

rolled carriages down two-track

paths until the dirt was stone,

watching the eternal from their

handblown windows

as it tilted through centuries, like

a faithful planet

that doesn’t regard its reflection

bouncing off distant moons,

light traveling back so slowly the

world has moved on, its orbit

endless, drawn by forces

exerting their will in the darkness,

which on this falling January night

has drawn the sky close

like a wool coat, the lights in

homes once run by servants

flickering without a wince of post-

imperial shame,

and South London looks up

at wisdom winging down

at them like a bat flying on sonar:

how nothing remains, that in

mere years, their love, with no one

but each other as witness,

will have found some other way

to mark time, not by being

boundless, but bound, as the sky

is to ground at the close of day.

Lacking Measures

Lacking Measures

1

I have been here forty days and most nights — as

the air thins

to evening chills and the cold white lozenge of

the moon licks

the sky white round its edges, I try to

understand

why I have put myself in a place where all I can

do is watch myself

think. And then think about that thought.

2

I imagine if I open my skull like a gourd there

would merely be

another head inside, an overgrown seed,

and inside that one

yes another one, and so on. At least they are

mine, but I wonder

what bitter ground they grow from. I am not

however to ask myself

this question, it is macro-temporal,

impossible to know

and, they say, incapable of being changed.

3