Cats and Dogs

If cats are all about catastrophe,

Katabasis, a journey long through Dis,

Where lazy night and sleep and dreams agree

To tell their winter tales to Anubis,

Then dogs are all about the coming dawn,

And listen to the wind the whole long climb

Upon the day and stars and further on

To tell their summer tales to endless time.

I have a cat (I couldn’t have the other) –

He tells me when it’s twelve o’clock at night,

When he becomes my psychopomp and brother

And shows me my reflection in dim light.

Perhaps I could be ready for the stars

When Venus lies again with planet Mars.

Ice Age

I hear a lark ascending, close my eyes –

I open them again to gloom and rain;

Like shutters opened, closed, sunset, sunrise,

And then the dark, and then the light again.

Why do my days collapse within the hour?

What makes a night of day and day of night?

Is that the sun I see within the bower,

Or does the moon ascend from mind to sight?

I want it now, that age of ice foretold –

I want to laugh at winter and the dark –

I want to live a thousand years of cold

And while it bites recall that unseen lark.

So there it rises, cloud and midnight visible,

Sans sinking of the mind the sun finds risible.

The Truth about Corners

You know that you are followed from behind

Of every room; from every corner round,

They watch us and they judge us – not too kind,

They’re not too kind, not of our kind or bound.

These corners, then, in turn have corners too,

And corners corners to the reach of space;

So endless time allows an endless queue

And endless are the spaces they encase.

So when I speak, I speak to such a group,

Aware of an infinitude of eyes;

This spins my brain a dizzy loop-de-loop

While hearing their infinitude of sighs.

So this is all I have within my mind,

And this is why, to here and now, I'm blind.

The Fruits of Knowledge

Once when the Sun was married to the Moon,

Our World was thought their rightful girl or boy,

And so our earthbound realms were thought and hewn

From selfsame substance, all with equal joy.

Joy in the marriage of the high and small –

Joy in the faultless, sounding sphere on sphere –

Joy in the high king’s festive golden hall –

Joy in the smallest hearth on his frontier.

But then the moon and world were turned to rock

And then our sun became just one of trillions

And ever new cosmogonies did shock

And left us standing by a cliff in billions,

Aghast and staring into an abyss,

While eight or nine proclaim the black hole bliss.

Easter Morning

Everything is odd about existence –

We’ll feel much better when the winter’s gone –

Its spheres, inside and out, and their persistence –

A lover’s smile, the leaping of a faun –

We are the blushing fingers of the whole –

The cat nearby me snores within his sleep –

I move towards the dawn with happy soul –

That smile, it floats above, I halt to keep –

This morning is in reverie, complete

With sun upon my bed, my cat serenely

Reclining in the blankets at my feet

Until I think to reach, break, rise, and cleanly

Bequeath my cat to its sweet lunar dreams

While all around me dawn in daylight teems.

(Youthful) Metaphysical Mathematics

“Infinity is plus on plus on plus

And cannot be conceived without addition;

And even when you take away, it’s thus,

And thus it stays – division sans remission.”

In childhood I would stay awake and think

And such profundities were common then;

And thus I linked my life – and link on link,

I chained my days within my youthful ken.

Forever then my ever-adding soul

Could not therefore divide from this and that;

For part and part were both apart and whole

In earth and seas and skies; I wondered at

The starry nighttimes that encased my days –

My endless days – from then to endless always.

Celebration Rain

The rain is sweet upon my open face

And on my tongue, it bubbles like champagne

Right to my soul, reviving that fresh grace

I had as youth when tasting this same rain.

I turn my gurgling smile to you, and there

You stand, in awe, euphoric, drenched, in tears,

And looking back at me without that stare

Of doubt and fret that masked you all these years.

And there they are, our wet and smiling neighbours,

And all their neighbours too, in circles, drink,

Forget, forgive, in tears - as wasteful labours

That weighed upon their souls dissolve and shrink.

The morning rises on a different day,

No rain, just sun to burn the rain away.