Monday, March 1, 2010

Angela Gardner


Three hours out from Heathrow

After a dinner party once
you stilled my hand

Don't blow out a candle
my brother is a sailor


Above the dark blank Baltic
I thought of him

The lonely sweep from a lightship
three hours out from Heathrow

And as the plane descended
I struggled ears filled as if with water

and clutched the landing card
as all the lights of London blazed


Landfill

that sudden unexpected glimpse
as you look into a mirror

and expecting to see your self
look into emptiness

here the silvered distance
from my world's end to beginning

charted by hemispheres of the skull
or the heart's unsafe harbour

an illusory figure sails
sightless (just off frame)

no promise of the infinite
or landfall beyond

instead a shape of air
sailing deceptive water


Other's sleep

It is a dark
Shared with my lover's son.

A high plain
Scaffolded with prayer flags

Quiet as on a field of battle
Yet to be commenced.

Thin fabric fluttering
on spindly poles. The shuffling

of others as they shift position under
our endless forest. So many prayers.

We raise aloft our tallest
dreams to face this merest breath of wind.

(The past was easier to forsee
my earliest memory a rainshower

through sunlight. Monkey wedding.)
How can the dreams of these wakeful

nights be interpreted? Others sleep.
We await the dawn.


Measure

A crossroads if you will - complicit
between the physical and the emotional
There in the sensuality of the eye
a flood of colour. We steady ourselves
regain balance in the give and take
of breath
Wave after wave exhaling
until all is washed clean
Head cradled against fishing rods
the run of line
leaded with weights to its barbed hook
finally trusting emptiness. We pack down tight
in the belly of the car ferry
Truth now lies in memory
a return from the Zen practice
of being
unflinching at the beach
under the endless gaze of sky

-all poems previously published at Foam:e

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