The Castle


Smoke on water,
clouds and mirrors,
reeds like drowning arms.
You stir a painted toe in
the loch and light shivers,
last sparks of the summer.
It would be easy to be lost here:
we fall in and out of dreams,
and could die as easily as lose our way.
Night takes everything, you say,
and soon there is just voice, then less,
stars are sewn in gold at last,
and cold's a kiss.

Measurings

Bad, bad blogger. Don't know why: work, maybe. Been writing lots as well, so that's maybe something to do with it. First of a wee run of appearances on Tuesday at Thomas Tosh in Thornhill, at 7.30 pm, then Glasgow the night after. Here's poem inspired by non-pupil day at school.




Measurings



The windows frame the blues
that bank to the horizon,
throw up hints of the beauty
welled out there and
displaced by circumstance.

So the internal view too.
Our speakers have a screen
that swims with sentences like eels,
today’s terms of reference,
but words are everywhere

like air, and turn
to dread or desire more readily
than the curriculum:
that way, the sun on old wood like blood,
and there, that girl you could love.

Life is full of ghost measurings,
the gaps between what you pretend,
and what you are,
where you’re sitting now,
and where you really ought to be.

Xiape

Stone Girl


Last night the stone girl smiled at me.
She has changed since coming here,
for the better. There were stone girls to spare
once, but the few left are in garden centres
with wishing wells and fishing gnomes,
their dreams gone to ponds and pebble dash.
The rain will course from their tunics,
their faces smudge with sausage smoke.
She was on a sculpted lawn in Nunholm,
demure with her water jugs. We took
her home to stand in wild vine and lemon balm.
She took root in the bedlam.
Now ankle deep in tansy
she sloshes back from the sanctuary
with wine, her bared breast no decoration
but a carefree accident, or come-on.
Xiape, the stone girl seems to say, be
yourself like me, be free.