Small Things
Jonathan Barnes
Copyright 2012 by Jonathan Barnes
SCRIBE
To begin with confession:
this love affair
with my own pen.
How could I not adore
this rapier tip
that scores the page?
This roving point
that moves in unison
with my own thoughts?
With one quick scratch
what did not live
is given flesh,
and lies there
on the page
in fossil form
for those who follow.
Consider:
lamplight, murmur, leaves, a bird.
As each word rises off the page
it flares,
each like a struck match
in an unlit cave,
and has its brief life
full-lived, fleshed,
a taste inside the mouth
as full as summer.
My pen,
my noble scribe,
who lays down good and bad
with equanimity,
who never judges nor extols,
allows me at the least
to farm the words
which move the mind,
to reach beyond
my own arm's length,
and at the best
to lay those perfect footprints
in the sand.
THE BLUE DAY
Today I long for the gentlest of sounds:
the voice of a piano from another room;
a bee, after leaving its swaying flower,
passing me by in the afternoon.
These things remind me that the world
Is composed of others’ lives, and that
packed together like the stems of ripe wheat,
there is only the solace of a peaceful mind.
In through my ears comes the clear blue day,
where the sunshine unclenches the knotted leaves.
Nothing is quieter than the coasting clouds
till the woodpecker hammers in the silent wood.
I have searched for sanctuary
In uncertain places, and found it in streams
where the green water slides
with the sound of a jug perpetually pouring.
LARK SONG
Man has always
envied larks;
their voices,
far too full
of jubilation,
travel through
an afternoon
like whispered words,
and leave man rooted
in the soil
as dull as rocks.
But man is hunger,
and to win the day
he hunted larks
with mirrors
planted in the soil
like stars.
The innocent
made easy meat;
their flesh
became his own
as blood absorbed it.
But their song
of life
he could not keep,
for as with joy
or love or art,
the fist
destroys it.
THE URGE
The way there
is the narrowest road I know,
perhaps no wider than a single word,
and the journey is a lonesome one.
Those who persist
discover the road goes on and on.
It does not return.
It affords no rest.
There is no reward
for those who travel it,
beyond the virtue
of moving on.
A MATTER OF DEGREE
He is no different from the rest;
like every man who ever lived,
he must have water.
Each day he drinks, and takes his quota,
oblivious or otherwise to the constant duties
of his kidneys year on year.
The chemistry of nerves and brain
depend upon the longing of this cells
for water.
He dreams of it: the seas, the rivers,
placid lakes, the rain-soaked moss
and summer showers, the clink of ice,
his cleansing bath, even the lush
abundance of moist leaves.
He thirsts, and his thirst is that
of all mankind.
He is bound by it, like gravity,
by the laws of physics, the story
of creation.
His body knows, if he does not,
that lacking it, he is but dust
and minerals on a desert floor.
And yet one day, at leisure
in a shallow pool, he drowns.
FROM THE HILL
The sky
took its shape
from the sound
of bells.
They rang
with the blue light
of evening
slanting into
the sullen pines.
They rang
with the voice
of five hundred years
and all that
had passed there.
They rang
till the barley
grew still
in the fields,
and went on
ringing,
the incessant
solemn
monotony
of bells,
shaping the shadows
on the hill,
and the one
who watched there.
ORANGES
They come from the south,
arriving like migrating birds,
bringing locked in humid flesh
a flavour bright as the songs
and the sunshine of their land.
To hold one is to have at one’s command
a teeming world of succulence
and colour, a tiny planet
divided into seas and waterfalls
of sweetness as sharp as brittle glass.
Nowhere in the realm of man is anything
so clear as citrus, painful almost
in its vibrancy and sting of life.
The orange fell from heaven, bearing in
its bounty, keys with which
to unlock daylight in our dark.
MOONLIGHT
Unannounced
and quiet as snow the moonlight comes.
Over the resting land it finds its way,
and paints the pastures and the towns
with colours which we give no names.
Serenely still
or racing through the wind-borne clouds,
its stealthy light seeps into us
and quenches there a thirst we did not know.
We turn our heads, but the moon remains.
THE MEETING
How did they spend
those final hours?
Did they, as I had,
simply watch the road unwind
like tape laid out across the fields?
That day – benign and softened by the sun –
had made it easy to believe
that life was fine.
I like to think they’d spoken kindly,
laughed and held each other’s hands,
but had they bickered
or complained, or felt resentment
for some lack, it’s all the same;
the road must end.
I came upon them in their tomb,
their sepulchre of steel,
boxed in and crushed beneath a wagon
weighing tons.
The f
lames had died,
the scorched earth round the wreckage
marking out the spot
like punctuation on the land.
Not for me the phone calls and the tears,
the long transition into different lives
and states of being. No.
I had been blessed, that day at least,
and given all life has to give:
the chance for more.
SNOW
Today
the world
must be redrawn;
snowflakes
have settled
white on white
and wiped away
the green markings
of the land.
Today
birds labour
through pale sharp air.
Sound
has departed
into the earth,
drawn down softly
amongst the roots,
the slumbering seed,
the unimaginable dream
of summer.
Darkness too
has bled away,
drained from the shadows
beneath the trees.
The land and the sky
are sewn together.
Only my feet
continue their racket,
those noisy companions
punching their imprints
into the snow.
Alone
I trudge the barren glare,
a crawling dot
on a bleached
white page.
I am
the heartbeat
in the ice,
the frosted breath,
the striving pulse,
for in this pitiless well
of winter
I am the living.
WIND AND ROSES
The wind-tossed garden,
walled, entire, and restless
as a great green sea,
is paradise disturbed,
shaken by the testing air
to find what lives
and how it’s fastened
to the world.
I too am part,
my hair like grass
examined by
the surging tides.
I listen to what
makes me listen,
search the turmoil
of the trees
to find my
own pulse there.
I am alive.
I am alive
in wind and roses
under the burgeoning sky.
JUDGEMENT
From fire to water
and to earth,
we need it all.
If man could choose
he’d build a hell,
not because
he’d wish it so,
but thinking that
he knows what’s best
he’d disregard
the vital grit
that makes the pearl.
So tell me,
is it dirt or soil?
Man knows the difference,
and only man.
MIRROR
There is something of the moon in mirrors,
silvered and unfathomable,
a place of cold hard mineral and dreams.
No arm was ever long enough
to reach that land beyond the glass.
No winds blow there,
no sunshine warms, no showers fall,
no trees, no living thing performs.
That world that you are looking at
does not exist.
Yet again and again our eyes return.
How ardently we long for those lost questions
that the moon and mirrors must retain.
THE OLD PLACE
Before you
there were many generations.
My doors
have opened and closed
on a multitude.
A throng of voices
have argued and sung,
wept and whispered
inside my walls.
There were young and old
each acting out
their measure of life,
each finding in me
that private retreat
from the scrutiny of eyes.
At night they slept
with my arms around them,
and peace overtook them.
They valued my care.
They may even have loved me.
But I never belonged to them.
Then you arrived
with your tools
and your noise.
My rafters and joists
were eased and altered
and light reached into me
where darkness had been.
I heard your tread
on my stairs all day.
You came and went
like the passage of the sun
and I came to know you.
But I was never yours.
Now, silent once more,
my rooms are filled only
with dust and shadows.
Ivy reaches across my panes.
A green gloom invades me.
But soon more will come,
and I shall bloom
once again
in another summer.
Laughter and tears
will spill into my interior
and I shall hear their voices
like the boom of waves.
I shall be reborn,
and the life of others
will flood me with meaning.
In time they too
may come to love me.
But they shall never possess me.
ICARUS
It died alone –
the tiny bird
not yet a fledgling –
crashed like Icarus,
its wings too feeble
and unformed
to save it from
the hard cold earth.
Its lumpen body, clumsy,
pink and luminous as wax,
was laid on gentle leaves
and petals brought down
by the storm,
as if displayed
for mourners who might come.
But only I would witness it,
the pity and the pitiless
that makes this world.
I stood and watched it
for some time – this voice
that never would be heard –
and did the only thing I could:
remembered it.
PHOTOGRAPH
It tumbled from a dusty book –
this captive from a dimming world
in black and white.
A man is standing on a bridge,
intent on crossing, though for forty years
he has not moved.
All history is stopped. All breath
and being is locked immobile
in a piece of paper microns thick.
The figure – lean, dark-haired –
is trapped inside its small eternity,
an insect in an amber stone.
And there it lies, cut from the space
between bright molecules, an image
like an old coat left to hang.
And yet it resonates down all those years,
for he is me, his form the shape
of every echo, every nerve that ever rang.
Each thought, belief, sensation, taste,
was given birth inside that outline –
black and white – which stands
and waits perpetually in silent air.
AUTUMN PIECE
October’s call:
a cello
spilling into
mournful air
its soft
brown voice.
The odour
of things past
settles in us,
and we lean
towards the e
vening
made of orange
flame and
cool blue glass.
Now,
now we recall
the music
of the bees
and hot wild
perfume.
But the leaves
pour down,
and we cannot stay.
The dark earth
bares itself,
and we – frail beings –
must creep into
the long dark night,
and hope for stars.
BENEATH THE TREES
What kind of comradeship was this:
this boy-shaped shadow in the trees?
What form of comfort did he draw
from those deep roots: the elm, the beech?
Year after year the seasons were at work
in the wood. Bees were distributed
amongst sweet blossom, and at night
the stars sat perched in the branches.
He wanted it to be like love,
this honest passion, simple as the
colour green. And it was so, for
where men trod was not so true.
Inside his bones the language of the leaves
was heard: an ancient voice.
Beneath the boughs he felt their great hearts
Pulsing into patient lands.
IN UTERO
I came from the deep,
from the night-deep nursery
of the undreamed,
cradling inside me
a dark star of love.
A river runs through me.
An ocean of tides
beats in my ears.
Soon I shall know
the vision of air;
my coral bones brace
against the clamour.
I shall come.
I shall be.
Steeped in my moon-dark
cell of water,
I am growing the seed
that will become my heart.
BRIGHTON SONG
I came from the station with its slamming of doors,
with its drumming of diesels as they made ready,
and I headed off down the long straight hill,
for I longed to be close to the deep dark sea.
The lampposts lit my way to the shoreline,
handing me on like a chain all the way.
Their sour light showed me the streets of the city,
but it could not uncover the deep dark sea.
Then came the zest of salt from the blackness,
and the suck and hiss of surf on the strand,
and all the works of man were as nothing
to the sound and the smell of the deep dark sea.
I had come at last to the final barrier,
where the stones of the beach and the road converge,
and I filled my lungs and my head and my heart
with the size of the life of the deep dark sea.
DREAM WOMAN
How glorious
to breathe your
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