A Date in Winter
T J Price
Copyright 2011 T J Price
Smashwords Edition
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Table of Contents
A Date in Winter
And now the open, neglected book,
the gift that no one took,
the moth suspended on the window
at dawn, grey and hollow.
And now the clank of the old gas fire
as the sun begins to tire
and conversations in past tenses
in between longer silences.
And now the moon, transparent in blue skies,
the telephone’s chill little cries,
the answer machine saying no one’s in,
then her voice, to which I listen
next day, while, splinter by splinter,
frost crosses out a date in winter.
Bad Weather
During the night and around about three
The river washes the world out to sea,
Streets tip up and go down like ships,
Public statues slip and break their hips,
Windows shatter and furniture floats,
Mocking the notion of serviceable boats,
Like the wardrobes that attempt to sail,
Though the crew are clothes and cannot bail,
Soon the wind sweeps all the rest away
To leave nothing except a ball of clay,
And when this, the world, finds a calmer shore
Those there ask, ‘So, what was this for?’
The Moor Beside the Sea
You are one of the blessed,
sharing life, you’ll share endless rest,
but I lie alone beside the sea
because all herb and stone is me,
upright and silver late in the year,
in summer, toppled and sear,
like the swallow and her helix shadow
I am above and below also.
In earth and air as one I thrive,
barred from eternity, yet long alive,
while the sea, wave by loving wave,
dissolves me in a restless grave.
In the Park
(A free translation of Joachin Ringlenatz’s Im Park)
A deer stood by an old elm tree
Still and strange, as if in a dream,
And that was midnight less three,
Then returning from where I’d been
I passed by and saw it again,
The deer in a dream still seeming.
So, quiet as a ghost, I left the lane
And through shade and shadow nearing
I reached the elm and very gently
reached out, hardly breathing . . .
A concrete statue – naturally!
The Frogs
(After Die Froesche by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe)
A frozen pond in the frozen heath
Where the frogs, forgotten underneath,
No longer able to croak or spring,
Swear to God they will learn to sing,
Or at least rill and purl like the dove,
If only He’ll let them back above.
Soon the de-icing season came,
The hedges flourished and hid the lane,
The frogs rose, rowed and leapt
From the depths where once they’d slept
And on the bank, as creaky as any door,
They croak much louder than before.
Pair Orchard
Mind, mere electricity, must run to earth and we’ll stop,
last words falling away,
sliced in two and our mouths will drop
(they have nothing more to say)
tongues no sharper than overripe fruit.
Yes, there’ll be new crops – time multiplies
the seasons, but we will never compute
them because we’ll be dust, and dust flies.
So we’ll be picked off, one by one, you and I,
having thought only about when and where
we die. Or, instead of thought, we might lie
in rhyme, a deathless chime, grown into a pair.
Voyage
Happiness, even if a continent
would be impossible to find
because the sea of time is infinite,
and though each year the charts are refined,
each year another life full of holes
is drowned, leaving the flotsam behind,
of old material goals,
all you were able to find.
Console yourself for lack of air
to see the waves above, in crowds,
scurry to the shore. They’ll vanish there.
And the world too – that bubble in the clouds.
The Reason
Navigating by a windup clock
and against time and tide
they reached (at the final tick and tock)
an island on the other side.
There they learned the reason and had to laugh
at why cogs must match
and why the balance, spring and pinion,
like a puzzle with a hidden catch,
should each hour sound the opinion
that they would not rise anew . . .
then on waking they knew the reason
was not quite true.
First Instructions Last
The last A and B were joined along the dotted line,
(marked C) but could not be stuck for lack of glue,
and so, in time (which is terpentine)
everything else will undo
and never again be repaired.
Furniture will turn to sticks,
fractions will outnumber wholes, and unpaired
nature will lose its patent to fix
itself, and when the beaks and wings of birds
lie among the scattered limbs and leaves of trees
then, between assorted mouths and ears, our words
will lie in heaps of A B Cs.
What Brought Time to a Stop?
There’s no sorrow in a motionless world
Fixed on the arm of a starfish sun,
The seas gilded and cloud tops pearled,
And forevermore the wicked undone.
In the other-side country
They sigh on couch and mat,
Stare at the star-lit estuary,
Dark waters, endless night, death and all that.
But from today death has been suspended,
The most fragile bubble will never pop,
Laughingly, the truth has been upended –
That’s what brought time to a stop.
Clockwork Soul
The soul is made of tiny, busy clockwork
flawed by a minor manufacturing quirk,
a fault that we yearn to remove,
yet cogs and levers are tricky to improve,
so small and easy to break – but not to fix,
lets just be grateful the article ticks.
Forget prophets, their manuals are nonsense,
the authors never had a watch-repair licence,
true, their movements resound at larger scales,
but eternity is larger still – the word fails
and all gods fall silent in time,
but not, perhaps, our tinny little rhyme.
The Wood
Down Old Salt Road the coppice trees
suggest resurrection in the shape of leaves,
till autumn and we who wear and tear
fold on the landing and trip down the stair.
Then winter comes to stay for longer than before
and the songbirds call from another shore
and ever higher, and ever rounder,
snow is the moon that turned to powder.
If the seasons stopped and summer never came
we would never live, or never die again,
so perhaps next spring best not arrive . . .
see the branches tremble now, and revive.
Coming next year, Candy from Saturn. In an impossible number of impossible worlds, these stories are . . . possible.