A Thousand Leagues Away

Why can I never find the words to say,
as you hold my dreams and them defend,
I feel you a thousand leagues away?

The thought of you is many-hued ray,
and your warmth floods my own dark blood.
Why can I never find the words to say?

I can find you in the green and grey
of moss and slate; I know my friend,
and I feel you a thousand leagues away.

That's where I left you anyway.
It broke my heart to tear these continents apart.
Why can I never find the words to say

that, though we frolicked in a meadow and were gay,
to build a castle, my left slipped your right hand,
and now I feel you a thousand leagues away?

I made the night time to separate the days,
and, seeing how I do not sleep, you somehow understand
why I can never find the words to say
that I feel you a thousand leagues away.

Water

You may think that water is just
the primary moving part
in the machine 
of the world.

But when it rains,
it calls out to us
from gutters, drainpipes, 
rivers and ditches.

And so it is a communicator
of the secret and forgotten passages
by which it passes through
the human layer.

And when it rains,
the roads and pavements shine
and street lights live again
in the darkness of puddles.

It is a renewer
more honest than snow,
and it gives second chances to those
who have burned theirs away.

Water does so many things
and does them so many times.
Perhaps its power of revival stems
from making each its first.

River and Her Man

I, a witty human,
buzz at the surf.
It, a muscular river,
paws at the shale.

A mosquito and a hippopotamus,
we live up to the limit
of each other's worlds.

Applying tiny forces
in highly specific ways,
I call myself
sophisticated.

It roars in ascent
and in retreat,
ever outward facing.

It does not choose.
It is the most complete
embodiment of its own
possibilities.

In a boat, I row across it,
drawing a line
in the extended now
of my inner world.

It whispers
directly into my dreams,
from beneath,
at the softest part of my mind,

rolling against my
least-known shore
and doing what she
always does,

shaping me in ways
my clever brain
will never comprehend.

Trees in Mist

There is nothing as strikingly alive and conscious and intent and majestic and wise as a tree in mist. I think it's because the mist places the tree on the boundary between the visible and the invisible, and so as you look at it, head tilted right back, mouth hanging open, eyes dry, it is permanently in a state of arrival, and you are experiencing the moment when trees came to our planet for the very first time, and you are wondering if they have come in peace or for mutual benefit or to crush everything they consider a threat into tiny pieces.

I also think it's because the mist makes the air the place where things are really happening. No longer does the world start with the greenness under your feet and stop a couple of metres in the air, while a bunch of other lifeforms take it all too far and keep going up way beyond the level where things are still people. Instead it shows you that there was always much more above the ground than on the ground, and that you should look up, and when you do look up at the world above your head and find it full of dark, mandelbrot-skinned personalities in smoky gowns, you will always feel like a mouse or an insect that has just run into the place where the giants meet.

But no, these are not the giants who will raise a casual foot and with it make your life tiny, dark and short. Nor are they here to validate your self-consideration. They are tactile. You can tell from the way they let you feel their furry flesh from hundreds of metres beneath their vast bodies with your eyes. They are made to be looked at, made to be touched by awe-struck minds. They are proud and particular and unique, and they are not particularly interested in you. I love to see trees in mist because they are beautiful, so beautiful and because they yield to me, unthinkingly, the consolation of my insignificance.