Tag Archives: Postcards

Costa Blanca

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The sky has disappeared
or is it me
who ceases when there’s
only sea
and grey horizon
lightens into white
identical to sky?

When every sight:
the mountains, buildings,
and the trees;
the plastic medlar covers,
the hives of bees;
hill-climbing coughing trucks
filled with wet goats;
through-wetted web nets
and the wakes of boats —
go missing, mingling,
mixing in the haze.

Are they what’s gone
or am I in a daze
to think discernment
matters in the theme?

Today all Costa Blanca
is one dream.

Beach Busker’s Ballad

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Come visit me alone, for one’s enough
that any quorum lacks to vote defeat.
Come visit me in Cadaqués. We’ll hide
out basking on the baking rocks and poach
sweet views of pulchritude.
                           The octopus,
as sturdy as a horse except no bones,
inks out its living in the open sea,
and I eke mine on land.
                          It’s marginal,
my living, but, like me, sufficient here.

I catch up passing tourists with my song
and share with them their wine and daily bread.

Unlike the octopus’s prey, mine live
to warn the others, though they never do.
They boast instead they stole away my song.

They sing for years the tunes I have forgot.
I misspeak verbs in languages they learn

in later years, the better to esteem
the wisdom of the octopus we eight
or was it four flushed. Come visit me. We’ll hide.

Carriage House Parables

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This carriage house, two-storied, brick, and topped
with soft-red tiles festooned with spiders’ webs,
boasts to me, ‘For centuries I have stopped
the rains and winds, and known that both have ebbs.’
We humans, it says, know but one phase: floods.
We call it ‘life’ and think no ebbs exist;
but buildings, at least old ones, know that buds
must also wither — and always persist.
The carriage house, who learned from its own bricks,
as they learned from their water, straw, and clay,
assures me no life forms are monostichs,
and all of them, and we, forever play:
‘As long as time spins space, and space spends time,
we stand and fall and stand again and climb.’

Teatime at Guinness Outpost

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My spelling checker flips to Rorschach mode.
‘Cremates’ was its suggestion for ‘cream teas’
when I typed ‘creamteas’. The ill this flip must bode
is the basis for my trembling as I ease
a first Guinness from the sideboard, let it chill
down to the temperature of the room
I pretend is British but comes from the bill
for heating that I swept with a new broom
into the fireplace where I store the wood.
I could not pay. When I told that to the gas
man, he said, ‘I did not think you would’.
Read and tremble at what comes to pass
when poets stoop to identicals to rhyme
and chat with spelling checkers till drinks time.

Nodding and Noodling at ‘De Koperen Vis’

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Last of the summer wine. September sun.
I take my ease, and yours. I meditate
on how life’s less fair than weather in the run
that we call long. The choppy waves reflect
the pointilisstic view mayflies must see
in their one-day lives. In contrast, oaken trees,
like those whose steamed and twisted beams comprise
this harbour’s boats, live longer than do flies
and longer than we will. My long-stemmed glass
goes empty. Autumn chill consumes the shade.
I move my chair to where some sun still reigns.
I think of a rainy city where my son
is working in a tower like I did
when he was younger, and I was not old.

With my back turned to the water, face to sun,
I let the climate take me where it will.
The play is ending as it had begun
back when I had not noticed, and the thrill
of the closure fast approaching was not mine.
I am north of New York State, east of Quebec.
The Gulf Stream keeps me warm enough for now.
Rare birds of plumage — humans, others — trek
about the wharves and water-fronting spas.
Not many people join me in my pause
out on this sunny terrace, where imagined
encounters and adventures quietly pass
into tall tales that novelists will write
all winter waiting for Spring’s holy light.

The wind resembles friends who this year died.
in taking away, like they did, my best thoughts.
Yet, unlike them, the wind has never tried
to recompense me as they did by giving
me ideas of their own: a special gold.
The gold they gave me was the magic kind
that will, although the universe goes cold,
retain its value. They brought gifts of mind.

(on the sunlit terrace of Café ‘De Koperen Vis’ (The Copper Fish) in Monnickendam’s harbour)

September Siesta

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I lounge alone on Peter’s patio
that frames the gathering grey clouds storming past
between high-hanging, stock-still clouds of white
and me boxed here against the coming night.
The sun scores silhouettes on banks of white
and writes initials on the crescent moon.
The moon, self-centred from this patio,
backlights high-flying swallows as they flow
and flip, appearing swiftly from stage left
to exit right as cannon fire that soars
up moonwards. Downstage, modern feasting Moors
and Christians re-enact their ancient wars.

Timepiece Cascade

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He had removed his watch so he knew it was not time
that was passing. He could hear the waterfall
growing louder and presumably getting nearer
in the darkness that was everywhere these days.
A duet for two or, less precisely, tutu
rang in his ears — where else? — as he swept past
the islands Bridle Sweet and Bishops Nein.
He heard, ‘Take two aspirin scold me. Yule bee fined.’
That can’t be right, he thought. He reached the edge… …