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Underground eXperts United
Presents...
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[ Eight poems ] [ By Robert J Berry ]
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- THE MAKER * ISLAY * LIGHTHOUSES * AILSA CRAIG
- CAVES * CYCLES * THE PIER * SNOW
by Robert James Berry
THE MAKER
First
I make a
stark monochrome sketch
Then throw the clay
Turning my fingers
To mould four senses
Pedalling the treadle
Last I hang the lips
Hook the nose
I am spattered with clay
Flush with creation
Overnight
The head is put to rest
under damp cloth
I sleep with crossed fingers
Today
Cut from its pedestal
The muscles have stiffened
The mouth pouts
Suddenly I have
Gouged the eyes
Brought my hands together
and twisted the living thing
into a slimy lump
Again the wheel is turning
With the whole of my hands
Drawing the clay tall
My feet under the spell
I am remaking my head
Not with faith
But because I must
ISLAY
On her stomach's flat pan
The otter cracks shellfish
Then whiskers off
To waterproof preen
I turn to the unison strut of oystercatchers
jabbing the strand
and a horseshoe of basalt
where seals snore
You can catch their stink
Morning is running now
The mainland has unveiled
Buoys on the swell
in only a hat of cloud
The winter light is beaten gold
Brief ice
The silence cogent
As our ferry builds smoke
noses into the sound
I am stitching its wake
into this sheet
Feeling the patter of drizzle
The gulls whirling
LIGHTHOUSES
The peat bricks and
cleft wood
burn lavender
Tall
Shadows permeate the solitude
I continue to stoke the small blaze
Lever the firetongs
coax reticent wood
to crackle
A knot spits like a shooting star
extinguishes at my ankles
Out of the window
Over the water
are the rain-stained lights
of another country
The unaltering eye of the lighthouse
crabbed to land's end
In the condensation
With my index finger
I write your name
Fascinated
as the tall letters and arrowed heart drip
When the fire grows flames
The pane clouds
and my other country is folded away
under a wrapper of fog
Your companionable blink put out
I walk to my seat
and sit with winter
AILSA CRAIG
A fang from the sea monstered floor of
the straits
Or the igneous hat of a wizard
ruckling waves
Grown in the swell's accent
Fishermen mystify
A moonwashed beacon in the spring tides
In winter
A gruff sea demon
When gales utter guttural oaths
and north atlantic booms
This giant's toehold
Slides under the world
To become
In evening calms
A basalt pebble in the sea's playground
In the geography of dream
It is always inhabited
A turret struck for birds
A crag to cleave the sun in two
On canvas
Or off the rail of a ship
It is what it always was
Awesome Solemn
CAVES
Faith is secreted in caves
Away from light
Whooping like a pagan
Here stones guard their
most private grief
Water drips from the vertigo
With the virtue of patience
Carved monstrances of rock
The statuary of strange deities
Daubed with the
full stops of the world
are fed shadow
The dark is elephant-headed
Silence has tongue
Here faith
Slays demons underfoot
Calcifies fear as
flues of stone
Where bats are the only reverents
men will block steps
Cut out an auditorium of rock
Bringing smoke music
altars and assuaging gods
Because man must banish forget
The awful irreverence of death
CYCLES
Heat has mummified
The flower's bells
which shake like black castanets
in the earth's drought oesphagus
Over the graveyard
Sun assaults the dead
Dents crucifixes
Cracks marble
Chiselling its own epitaph
White roofs that noon has charred clean
Are like the waterless face
of a clad woman
stirring the dust with her sandals
At her gate
A pack dog is cannibalizing
the blown stomach and muzzle
of a brother
Sight hobbles
To lap a v-neck of sea
between the land's blistered shoulders
In another town
Cloche the bells
of a stricken god
Thonged by light
Soon sky is a torso of blood
and Sun is
humping its crooked back
below the world
Dusk stirs
An acrimonious
Chthonic god
Dogs gather
Man devours
his mate
Then the moon draws
A narrow harelip
and stars hang uncharitably
From the noose of heaven
THE PIER
late afternoon is
wet with light
Two fishermen stroll
the brawling surf
A lizard
decorates a sun-boiled stump
Time has settled on the pier's
dentistry of rotted timber
its bicycles
fishing pots and
Stinking bait
In the idle swell
Sunburnt men
dangle rods
Two mating dragonflies hover
Prehistorical as the
horned monsters
anglers pull in
Reefed up below
Are boats under black canvas
and gulls lashed
to the rocking water
At the curve of the world
Sun is a spitting apocalypse
Stood close to pier's end
A man scans the horizon
for a morsel of sail
and tosses a hissing butt
in the heartbroken ocean
Listening to the
Slosh and
amen of the sea
SNOW
Snow is
Winter's linen
Watch it print
A white page
Convert the firs and
outlandish hills
First snow is amnesia
Lost memories eddying
The flakes settle finally
inducing sleep
Its coma domes the world
In the high country
For cold clenched farmers
The year is finished
The nativity sheep are
bodies to burn
Our Father is a splinter of frost
Against a snow cliff
December dusk bleeds like a sacrifice
Then overnight men feel an uncanny stillness
The air is hoar wrought
Snow utters silently
From lungs of ice
Morning
From the timber church
Bells toll like creation
The thaw scrunches with life
Children scream build
The hills burn like bonfires
in the blue skies
Winter has gone out
The world is white as sainthood
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uXu #488 Underground eXperts United 1999 uXu #488
ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/texts/uxu/
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