Aeroplanes

The beach is made of glass

Walking backwards

On the far side of the rain

Footprints erase themselves

In swiftly drawn tongues lapping 

I am inside my Melchizedek

A message, overlong

Stained with salt, curled within

Break to find the ocean’s scrawl

–Almost indecipherable 

We chastise to the whine   and palsied shake of aeroplanes

Bright and corkscrew shards

Just a casual threat

In the thought of sudden falling

Now a sun-struck chisel mark 

In the poise of distance

Almost gone

Sky and shell and stone

I must, have painted the sky
Or if not me, someone else
In daubs of black, and moving lines
With that sidelong perspective 
That goes
from a starred point, to almost forever


Travelled a thousand miles
(Because almost nothing poetic can be heard
in the brute and wearying sound
of hard kilometres
– except
that too savage tintinnabulation)
Only to find
The ground is more difficult here
Than all previous history’s 
Inflorescences, gradually pressed
To the sandstone of
Inexplicable striations


Life is a coincidence 
Like the face of god you thought you saw
In a snail shell’s jagged lines
Gone with a second glance
And, perhaps, not really there at all