In Milan
Flew down to Milan for two days for a conference. It’s given me time to go see the works at the Brera, among other things, including this one:
Autumn colours
Since I only have a shit camera right now, I thought I’d post this instead. There’s these amazing trees across the valley. Their leaves are falling fast. The ground around is carpeted with them. The outer leaves at the branch ends are orange and pink, and nearer the trunk the leaves are a paler brighter yellow, and you get exactly the same pattern carried over onto the ground beneath. It looks just like the inside of a cut peach.
[Top]New poem
Hide and Raven
Follow the raven to the glade
down the trail
from the hide where it lurked
alert for carrion
– now silhouetted black
against sun-dappled foliage,
a miniature guard tower.
The rush of air under dark wings
as it backtracks
above the forest canopy
sounds like breathless fugitives
or panting hounds.
The ravens croak, each to each,
and all around, water drops
patter down through branches
and frosty air
that makes my exhalations smoke,
and, at the end of the forked path,
another mossed abandoned hide.
An unkindness of ravens flies
from the broken oak within
the Pauline convent’s ruins where
the blond wood cross shines in the sun.
New poem
Inspired by a Mackintosh banner bagpipe pibroche – I’ll post that up here soon.
Mackintosh Pibroche
Great pipe notes float like mists over Moy,
calling up wooded and empty glens
ringed by gnarled bare granite crags;
harled castles of my ancestors
still mirror glory in dark lochs
and shut yetts bar the ancient gates.
New poem
San Shek Wan
My bedroom has no curtains
to cordon where I lie,
but morning drapes the windows
with green, and clouds, and sky.
An eccentric erection in Pilisszentlelek
And I’m all for eccentric erections. But I have no idea what this one was for.
There it was, just standing in the forest on the hillside.
Autumn colours in Pilisszentlelek
Autumn comes earlier here in the hills. And unfortunately, my crap camera can’t do justice to the amazingly vivid saturated colours in the clear sunshine.
Esztergom at sunset
This was just before 7pm, when all the church bells started ringing. Bats were flying against the sunset sky, and the evening glow reflected in the Danube bend.
New poem
Hungarian Dawn
The sun paints golden stripes across the green,
from the next valley sounds an early train,
Esther, ecstatic, reaches for the chimes,
my tablet plays the Cosi overture,
and Mozart cuts straight through the walls
between the solitary cells
where we are doomed to pass our days
and gently lays his fingers on my heart.
Poets should be fathers, Coleridge knew:
nothing captures that dawning freshness like
having to wake up, getting out of bed
and sharing those first morning moments with
someone who cannot yet speak,
who does not need to hear a word,
and just wants to be touched and held,
for you can hold a child and a pen.
The whole world moves to music, intervals
between men’s voices, shadows of the trees,
ideas and impressions, following
the natural progression of the scales;
a black cat wanders down the lane,
bay horses neigh and flick their tails,
a pheasant coughs, according to
the resonance, the music of the spheres.
Humanity’s dark inner caverns ring
from mighty grounds, and what we think or write
is just an echo of those normal modes,
the notes and stops of consonants and vowels
the pentatonic scale of breath,
and we communicate in time
in unison of each and all
the rhythm that makes two hearts beat as one.
And so I spend those precious first few hours
in writing poetry instead of work
– time out from get and spend – with much to do
and with a family needing to be fed;
the blue water in the pool
lays its perfect mosaic of tiles
of light, and with the closing notes,
where our path ends, a rose exalts the sun.