Songs The Lightning Sings
The rain dissolves and carries mountains
The continents shift their rafts of stone and soil
Lightning remembers other worlds
Some hope that love is the last essential
some dream that words are a light in the darkness
but love is the measure of your loneliness
love is a cry you must answer
yourselves
This is your pain and your challenge
your gods are made
of your fears and desires
I sing with neither sense nor melody
my song does not need you or your words
This is the song that the lightning sings
This is the song of the world
For V
Soon after you leave
I take the poem into the street
It puts down all the usual stuff
vendors crying hot dogs and roses
brakes like manic hyenas
sirens slicing under surface mind
someone shouting BABY
I REALLY MEAN IT THIS TIME
And that girl
in a red hula skirt
she got candykill lips and cross-laced legs
suggesting
money for love
An old man spits blood - does noticing
ever make you compassionate? -
coffee and cajun compete
on gasoline wind lovers with tongues
and poets with tongues
try to reduce the distance
between selves
There is a police helicopter
where the moon has been
and balloons like giant yellow grapes
reach the fourth floor
saris and cashmere kaftans and blousons
wraparound shades someone's face
is almost all
flowers
One kid is smiling and laughing
as if
the answer is here other eyes
narrow like chicanes
I am thinking of you
free and happy
as the poem is saying that you
are remembered for ever
Words are such ambitious wistful liars
but you can leave spaces between them
Thank Somebody
I am trying to be glad
that you leave almost nothing
of your beautiful self
in these words.
Geoff Cooper
Lochwinnoch
5/12/2010
Under The Evening Star
On unvarnished oak, sofly grained and whorled,
roast lamb, decanted on cream earthenware,
juices seething under coloured skin,
bronze, dark honey, unexpected blues,
old gold and new,
alchemies of naked fire.
Where is the king, the queen,
who will tear this membrane, biting
to the depth of succulence
- vegetable courtiers attend,
artichoke, celery, purple chantenay,
crimson onions, beans
green as any spring.
On simple sycamore, children of the sun
peaches, apricots, tangerines,
vermillion apples, midnight grapes,
a blushing moment's vintage.
All the goodness of the living
and the dead - at a sash window
Venus summons and invites,
hands fidget
with napery and knives,
Lips rehearse
appetite.
All sorts of gods
preside.
Geoff Cooper
November 23 2010
Lochwinnoch
Unlimited
gravity has become so soft and cold and slow to melt
falling on the smoothness of your fingers
white like surrender and blossom
blinding the earth a mere
rejection of the sky
dwindling to
nothing but
water
primal liquor
genesis and continuation
tiny translucent seed of oceans
mother of rain and bread and kisses
sower of questions promises choices futures
child of lightning swelling the fruit of the womb
I touch the cool clear cosmos running from your palm
One
Arum flowers rise and follow
her passage through the meadow
in the hazel tree
an owl tunes his note
to the shadows of her wood
She sleeps in a hammock of soft branches
among the blossom of wild apples
fruits of wilderness and possibility,
tomorrow pauses in the throat
of songbirds
Her eyes contain constellations
histories, love - so many lovers
like stars,
so many centuries
you could not count them with kisses,
I have seen her
when my heart is empty,
- suddenly
when I have forgotten
the songs of the orchard
the harmony
of summer winds.
I have seen her when sad music
builds prisons in the mind
when the moon is sung by nightingales
and the voices of the dead.
The Red Fiddler (Marc Chagall)
Enters the freezing village,
as long as the world will spin
he has no destination
but the music that the brings
The red fiddler
carries the shape of a woman
makes snow horizons sing
conjures dances
from timber and cat-string
Crowds the windows
with expectant faces
shakes the coma
from cold minds,
sounds the revenge of melody
on the howling storm.
Now everybody can tell
there will be spring again,
lovers like blossom in the trees
lovers in the fields
hidden flowers
frantic angels
in the rising corn
Evening sunlight
of the cowherd's back,
an orchestra of birds
to startle every dawn.
The red fiddler
slowly leaves the houses
his music seems to fade
He bivouacs in bitter straw
but a smile
freezes to his lips
He knows
All the songs of spring
Sleep in his
ancient
violin.
Almost
You wake
from the last dream
The sky thins
Things disappear,
like stars
and other worlds
A yellow moon falls
The heart remembers
just to beat
Love like a deer becomes
one more shadow
in the wood.
