Northwords Now

We Will Breathe Each Other
Poems by Angus Dunn
Moon Return
The moon is full tonight
as it was full
when last we spoke,
before our castle walls
collapsed to formless dunes.
I was a child then,
I did not know
what substance would cement
those golden shifting sands -
if anything will hold
the structures that we make
with heart and hands.
The moon is full tonight.
Tides are rising
in New Zealand, Capetown
and in Tobermory Bay.
Beneath the shining sea
marine crustaceans
clack their limbs:
their courtly dance
makes hieroglyphics
on the silty ocean floor.
I turn and see moon-shadows
in the footsteps I have left
along the shore.
The moon is full tonight,
drawing us beyond ourselves.
I am a man now
at least in this –
I know the moves
our species makes
responding to the chemicals
of life, the energies
we swim through.
I know that this will pass.
I try to read the meaning
of these markings in the sand:
they will not last.
The moon will fill again,
and all will change.
This life too will fill
and fade, but when it’s gone
something of me and you will carry on.
The voice of moon and tide
will call us through:
I will look into a different face
and know it’s you.
Kernel
The taste of mango
as the sun goes down over Eoligarry,
the flavours in the clouds
complicated
by the acid orange streetlights,
delicious, somehow,
strung across the water,
across the sunset.
What is it, after all,
but the taste of my life?
Unable to swallow it all,
I blame the tightness in my throat
Cabrach Lover
for Nikki
Rings of tiny mushrooms grow
where my love lays
her fairy feet.
Scarves of tattered rain
fall down upon
her cool white shoulders.
Where the calf presses
against its mother
hiding from the sleet
or where the hare lies,
in its sodden covert –
she is there.
The sharny dubs that edge the road,
the mossy banks of swollen streams –
they feel her tread.
She is not absent from the soil.
Blood flows, or sap flows,
where skin or bark
are broken –
they do not break
they do not heal
without my love is there.
I will lay me down
across those fields
where rushes hide the grass,
where ice clings on through half the year,
and little nourishment is there,
for sheep still giving succour to their lambs.
And I will lay me down
where shadows of the birch
give meagre shelter to the deer –
for though the soil is thin
and sunshine scarcely more
than memories,
Boundaries
I know my love is there.
Here, where the tree stops being a tree,
here I will build a fence of twigs
to hold the cuckoo’s song
or keep the wind away.
Here, where the road edge
breaks down into tarry gravel,
here I will draw my line
and trim the toenails
of the world.
Here, where the breath that is inside me
becomes the air that we breathe,
here I will declare myself,
and as we come close
we will breathe each other.
Shaman
The clouds are not disturbed by your passing
but it is certain that you go from here
to where your desire takes you.
The earth does not tremble when you arrive
though it is sure that everyone and everything
knows you are there, at last.
Not one current of air, not the butterfly’s wings
not one cell in the body nor an electron in its spin
records the fact that you are gone,
but we know when you leave
and keep the drums beating
until you return.
It is Not
It is not that I expect to see
the unfolding of my plans.
It is not that I want the world
to shape itself around me.
It is not that I believe
the future is made
by my desire, by my intention.
It is this:
I want the texture of my life
to be smooth and rough
to be patterned and plain,
the taste to be salt
with tears, and
bitter with agonies
and sweet with reconciliation,
the heart to be broken
and mended, the face
to be stricken and peaceful
the lines of my mouth and eyes
to tell a story
worth the telling
and the hands, though broken,
to hold the shadows
of objects made,
of dragons wrestled
of skin caressed.
Northwords Now Issue 30, Autumn 2015 15