‘Rock Edge Reserve’ and Other Poems

Rock Edge Reserve

… whose land have I lit on now?
                    The Odyssey

Call it a day dear gods & float me
off this reef. It’s not in the story not even
at sea – these quarried ridges
corals shells gastropods drily

snag each sailing thought
ankle-deep in daisies. Poppies
buttercups. Saying them
out loud to catch the drift but nothing

doing. Must you dear gods always
clamp the blue & vanished
music to my ear? Mighty chunks
moonstruck in nettles & ferns

stuck into walls like tombstones. What if
tonight I pour a libation hoist  
a sail? O then the scribbled wake
as the roads of the world grow dark.



Otherwise
 
To think of it framed high
in beeches. Is to see
not the deer but the river

of us racing below
undrinkable as it watched.
The deer the lovelier. How

its thirst transfigured
briefly the M40, how
we flowed.



On the TGV

The thing is, the angel murmured
– disappearing through that casement,
word given, the moment framed –
to climb out. Find a ticket,
hitch on, skim the land due south
as it swells (on the left) darkly
higher to mountains, vineyards
combing out, farmsteads
in their fields rock-weighted,
the loopy Rhône ...