Smoke

Amidst ranked wattle, atop worn plumtrees,

Beside the rivers, silent down backlanes,

Unmoved through old streets, greying new buildings,

Death’s view at windows fronting horizons.

Under my eyelids, burning the nerve ends,

Trying lung tissue, breathe in then breathe out,

Clothing infusing past season’s colours,

Sending mind burnt cloud through givens, my skin.

The century’s gums, their masses of leaf,

Fur skin and fair bone, fabulous feathers,

Ground scoured down hard – their pluming remains

Billow in blueness, white, grey-black then black,

Disperse through tense towns, drift into valleys,

Cross long warm oceans, filter gone ash and loss.

Photograph: seven o'clock on the morning of January 15th at the local community gardens. The orange-pink dot is the sun. This is not the Heidelberg School.

Smoke (September)

Listening to a parishioner, or at his September desk with pastoral lists (Ah! Spring!), whooping it up half-time at a symphony, he’d be smoking. After, he went out to visit the sick. We could visit the sanctum sanctorum. Erinmore Mixture in yellow tins, Peterson pipes in a rack, everything kept in order for slow intakes. Smell of childhood, curtains filled with fumes. Eugene Peterson’s The Message is not the world’s greatest Bible translation. Taking liberties is the modus operandi. His ‘Vanity' in Vanity of Vanities and All is Vanity is ‘Smoke'. Withdrawn to his study, he packed a fresh pipe.