Epiphany

Andrew
in the dark
in the bath
Apple trees
scrape against the window

Emily
in the study
candlelight
flickering on her gold ring
A blank page
and a row of books

I’m addicted to your
desperate rhythms, I rise and fall with your breath
When you stop I stop, breathless.
I’m starving for your
neatness, your careful fingers
sewing buttons with tiny thread through tinier holes
I’m clawing for your
calm, the lake’s surface
hinting at the depth, the way
you create parallel ripples

And so I hurry home
to spill you
and taste you as I spell you out

And when my own writing is done,
I’ll read a poem by Elizabeth Smither
which talks about the gleaming morals of potatoes
Laughing, ha! Potatoes don’t have morals
but on poetry they do

Poetry
not even once.

Endings: a poem inspired by epitaphs

Today we learned about endings

How to create

a lingering sense

of full mouth and belly,

or the lasting sting of a slap,

something unvanquished, unyielding

How the shortest letter might

survive the thought that formed it,

ourselves,

our tombs,

and become a lasting link

‘Le fin est assez tragique’

But Oscar Wilde only ever expected

to be mourned as an outcast

by outcasts

We try

to say goodbye sweetly

the sanctimonious

pleasure of the succinct

but we are borne back,

ceaselessly, into the past

the last line only works if

it refers to the one before it

A small story impressed in stone

The last thing left

when we are called back

A dead language

on the grave of a Russian accentologist says

‘Language is a ford through the river of time

It leads us to the dwelling of those gone before;

But he cannot arrive there

Who fears deep water’

And so the teacher says,

to the upturned faces waiting below

we must not be afraid

to choose the last word

and let it speak for us

ceaselessly.

Nevermore.

A tribute to Edgar Allan Poe

“Works with obvious meanings
cease to be art”
yet we must not be obscure
for obscurity’s sake
the meaning should be clear, flowing
just beneath the surface

Like a heart beneath the floor perhaps?
Or a skeleton behind a door?

He disliked
pretenders , creating
deceitful characters to suffer ignoble deaths
though he died wearing another man’s clothes
and yelling “Reynolds!”

The first to try and live by his pen
alone, he suffered, as we do
losing his only love to a burst blood vessel in her throat
and descending into drunken madness

He was seeking
something, the real meaning
beneath, within,
but he hated
transcendentalists, and wrote
in careful, measured
heartbeats

“Lord help my poor soul”
he whispered when he finally saw the darkness
beyond the door