Our friend is seasoned on sloe gin tonight,
like a maple embering in autumn,
so at dusk by the fire the slightest
shift and settle
of logs crumbles ever-so-slowly inside
him,
and a thought, like a bird, like a
blackbird even
will lift from the branches of his
mind and rise
into the ragged tailwinds and entrails
of sky
- with all that dragging behind of
welts and torn-apart pasts -
to search for thermals rising off a
hilltop,
lice under a half-rotten log, a place
to meet its ghosts.
*
Look. Ivy braids up the scabbed bark,
ascends towards whichever heaven is foreclosed
tonight
but present, we know, just over the
horizon,
invisible in the ashy flakes; an abandoned cliff-top
night club defaced with war banners.
But now, here, in these embers, somewhere the pianist begins -
see her against the molten glow of plate
glass,
intent on the particular, caught like wool
in the notes.
(2nd Prize Wenlock Competition 2013)
