Winter Trails

Cloudy with Blinding Intervals

After days of grey, compromising smiles,
this pied and very painted sky returns:
dark threateners of rain below white flocks
crowding the innocent blue and shining
wherever Bel* might shoot far, puissant beams.

Cloudy with blinding intervals. My eyes
punished with green dots and blotches inburned
through empty sticks of elder, now wind knocks -
it dithers bones of tall grasses. Confined
deep gleams to clouds, in turn filled with bright dreams.

The drama of the disc’s return. Blind me
again, great Bel, and stretch my smile to split
in laughter at garden deliquescence.
But you subside instead, leaving me sane.

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*Bel / Belanos - Celtic sun / fire/ light god, still having shrines in Asturias, I believe.

Evening

The long dark western cloud is edged with fire,
its underskirts rent with a fearsome gold,
hemisphere most cleared to blue, a half moon,
bulbs a white eye, floating impossibly
within its cosy Newtonian way
simple visible focus of complex
Lagrangian dragon, tail wrapped round earth.
But I cannot fly there, trailing schooled dreams,
driving through shells of January streets.

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Night (Night)

All my skin shivers with a viral cold
inside the mere symbol of my suit.
Stars, baleful watchfires in an emptied realm
slunk to citadels hidden in wastes
huddling round yellow suns like ours
invisible to all but keenest eyes
of deep astronomy... But none break
radio silence, or else so far away
their shouts are travelling yet
vast distances of interstellar voids,
imprinted with magnetic hiss -
yet nearer now to me than you are,
Catherine.

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