and weep for what has been stolen, lost. Please.

It is like an earthquake and no one to tell.

An Afternoon with Rhiannon

The night before, our host had pointed out the Building

Larkin feared. He was right, I said, suddenly cold

and wanting home; cold later, too, in bed, listening

to wind and rain whip in to the lonely, misplaced town.

But lunchtime brought a clip of spring; a gold man mounted

on a prancing golden horse en route to the pier-head rendezvous

where your mother set you down. We watched you bumble

after pigeons, squeal as sun and air and Humber spun you around.

Around and around. Then you shouted Boat!, pointing

at nothing, Boat!, an empty river, a boatless blue painting

you haven’t begun yet. A small child’s daylight

is a safer place than a poet’s slow, appalling, ticking night;

a place where you say, in a voice so new it shines, I like

buildings! The older people look, the shy town smiles.

Losers

Con-artists, barefaced liars, clocks shuffle the hours slowly.

Remember the hands you were dealt, the full-house of love,

the ace-high you bluffed on. Never again. Each day

is a new game, sucker, with mornings and midnights

raked in by the dealer. Did you think you could keep those cards?

Imagination is memory. We are the fools who dwell in time

outside of time. One saves up for a lifelong dream, another

spends all she has on a summer decades ago. The clocks

click like chips in a casino, piled to a wobbly tower. An hour

fills up with rain. An hour runs down a gutter into a drain.

Where do you live? In a kiss in a darkened cricket pavilion

after the war? Banker? In the scent, from nowhere, of apples

seconds before she arrived? Poet? You don’t live here

and now. Where? In the day your mother didn’t come home? Priest?

In the chalky air of the classroom, still? Doctor? Assassin? Whore?

Look at the time. There will be more but there is always less.

Place your bets. Mostly we do not notice our latest loss

under the rigged clocks. Remember the night we won! The times

it hurts are when we grab the moment for ourselves, nearly –

the corniest sunset, taste of a lover’s tears, a fistful of snow –

and the bankrupt feeling we have as it disappears.

M-M-Memory

Scooping spilt, soft, broken oil

with a silver spoon

from a flagstone floor

into a clay bowl –

the dull scrape of the spoon

on the cool stone,

lukewarm drops in the bowl –

m-m-memory.

Kneel there,

words like fossils

trapped in the roof of the mouth,

forgotten, half-forgotten, half-

recalled, the tongue dreaming

it can trace their shape.

Names, ghosts, m-memory.

Through the high window of the hall

clouds obfuscate the sun

and you sit, exhaling grey smoke

into a purpling, religious light

trying to remember everything

perfectly

in time and space

where you cannot.