Kitchen

I peel back belief like the rings of an onion, brush covert tears with the back of one hand while clasping my knife in the other. The creeds and the councils are so many layers to prise and slide away: they drop like crescent moons into a bucket. The new living surface is soft to the touch. I unwind it nevertheless, slip under the wrappings of language to something dearer still. I will cherish whatever is there – a white nub of nothing, an atom, a pearl – knowing it is good news, trusting it is gift.

Figeac la belle

I remember a marketplace

O Figeac la belle

The bustle and laughter and summer cries

The little, shimmering well.

I remember a marketplace

Where we walked arm in arm

Where branches danced and the river danced

And lovers were free from harm.

I remember a marketplace

And how we stopped stock still

Over the breeze came music

From a sudden, haunting hill.

Over the breeze came music

Five men sat in a row,

Jackets of green and fiddles,

And gold flashed from their bow.

Gold flashed from their teeth and eyes

And black from their sleek hair

Up and away from them flew their sound

Into the golden air.

They bent their heads together

And their feet tapped the floor

Their smile passed quick as a javelin

As the sound began to soar.

They struck the air together

Time and beat were one

The key and chord leapt asunder

On the rarest of patterns spun.

As their sound began to soar it went

Into another land

And all the listeners hung on the thread

Thrown by their flashing hands.

They bent their heads together

Their feet tapped the floor

Round and round streamed the melodies

Out of the angel store.

The light grew long round the shadows

As the song sprang to and fro

And the lovers danced to hear the sound

Of the players’ brimming bow.

In the marketplace at Figeac

Five fiddlers threw wide the door

Our hearts flew up into a golden tree

And sit there evermore.

The Idiom of the Psalms

I heard our eldest son

Relate an anecdote

Whose lines our youngest one

Would take and twist and quite exaggerate,

Repeating this detail, changing that phrase,

To share an effervescent tale

Whose parallel cola quite amaze

The listeners they’d regale.

The eldest set a scene

Of heavy rain, when, lo,

The youngest said he’d seen

Big thunderstorms, and conjured up clouds low

On hills that fizzed and shook, and darkness round

The earth that billowed in the noise;

The floods have lifted up their sound:

The floods lift up their voice.

Can it be that they’re charmed

Spontaneously to raise

The idiom of the Psalms?

They seem to live, like trees, at the height of praise,

These boys of mine, and when the story’s over play

On cymbals and synthesizer songs

That sound as if their singers obey

A rule they’ll break before long.

Angels and Harvesters

As thoughts arrive

From god knows where,

Or sun breaks through

A fraying cloud

Emboldening a patch

Of trees, or grass,

They just appeared

From nowhere

Among the harvesters

The field a world

Of cutting, gathering,

Cutting, gathering.

Their outlines sometimes

Flickering brighter,

They walked between

The bending figures

Curious

Pausing to watch,

Like ancestors

Almost remembering

The world they’d left,

Or foreigners

Amused to see

The same things done.

They moved around

Unseen by all –

Unless one glimpsed,

Perhaps, light thicken,

A glassy movement,

As air can wobble

On summer days.

And then they went

Walked into nothing

Just left the world

Without ceremony

Unless it was

The swish of scythes

The swish of scythes