Geoff Stevens


Welcomesville

Battered red raw with the cold
beaten and tattered by the wind
the neon sign bleeds its blood
into a rare roast-beef sky
winks Cafe with a nervous tick
the uncertainty of electrical connection.
It mouths to unidentified object
sand receives light signals back
from things that cross the sky.
Beneath the sizzling sign
chromium hisses steam
a fly buzzes in an empty display case
and a little green man sits on a high stool
reading a book on cordon bleu cooking.
Cars pass-by rapidly on the darkened by-pass
like asteroids racing around a lonely planet
in the universal backwaters of existence.


Schwanengesang

Given curly black receeding hair
and full sideburns
Schubertresurrected by Klimts
its at the piano
as friends sing Der Shone Mullerin
and a lone soprano trips her way
through Standchen
while the sparse moth-light candleflames
select the colours of the women's dresses
for pin-prick breakdown analysis
the precious reflections of their jewellery
for a prismatic diffusion of fireflies
that glistens in the black satin darkness
of a retrieved time
in which sound travels more quickly than light


Hush Puppy

showing amber now
bruised suede
the sky steps down
upon the oil-shaled land
walks lightly on the crepe-grey sea
but soon its summer storm
will troop across Slyne Head
stamp its heels
in the Connemara mud


Above Kirchdorf

The air up here is stretched to disbelief,
our lungs gasping at its purity,
so we pause for cool orange juices
and cold apple strudels, at a lone house
that provides them on a small scale,
for a few schillings, not to get rich quick.
In the winter, we would not have made this walk,
as then the ski lift is operating.
But we arranged to climb last evening,
in "Der Wilder Kaiser", over lagers,
and now we watch the cattle grazing
on lush alpine pastures, sown with flowers,
the sound of cow bells tinkling like crystal.
And looking westward, in the distance,
is the mountain, its black molar throbbing
in the shimmer of noon's heat haze,
diamond snowpeak sublimating like dry ice,
scratching, intaglio, on blue-glass sky.

-all poems previously published at Argolist Online