Pulse of a Stone

 

Pulse of a stone

 

I thought I had something to say about all this;

the trip, our early return to bury your mother,

the worn state of our marriage,

myself as a dreamed of boy,

the meaning of that Tracey Emin piece.

 

We took our camper home with us those weeks,

packing up and moving on each few days

the children falling from their beds

if we were not careful and tied them down.

We drove like crazy through our childhood south coast haunts.

 

The children collected fossils, prised them out.

When had we agreed to give them small knives?

I cannot recollect. The care they must have taken.

Ammonites they found. I do not recall the walk away,

or understand how I wandered so far into the offing.

 

I met a stone in the toss and turn of a shallow pool.

It spun and pulsed, red then grey, held by forces.

Nature’s grip; gravity, friction, energy, (was it?)

The sea in leaving returning in the act of going.

My feet sinking as if the ground was dissolving.

 

Poem - Aleppo besieged city

Poem - Dog in a pub

A dog

his loping head peers

round the corner

of the wall to see

what is what here.

I am thinking of my mother again.

He catches the breath

of my thought; a litmus

test – did I do good

or not?

Into his steady gaze I see

her diminished frame

her mind a room within

a room, I clean

until it echoes with empty

with the stillness of

a hospital bed

descending around

her marble eye.

He dog-gulps,

mouths a troubled stutter

gathers and restands

echoes somehow

lithe taut mute

and turns aside.

Bathing the civilian dead

Bathing the civilian dead

Writhing trees in bitter rainfall

Two birds, dog fight planes.

Inky cottage shoulders mist

leaking smoke and steam.

It burns within, it is lived in.

In the shrieking canopy

gunshots – multiple rounds.

Stillness then an urgent gust,

a fresh wave of camphor water

rainfall bitter in trees writhing.

Poem - The Conjurer's Black Hole

The Conjurer’s Black Hole

Time stills; it pulls your train to thread and gives

you space to stretch your legs and be adrift.

Event horizon thoughts; the world must yield.

Matter conflates, a scream of brakes redshifts.

No end, no time to give an end, white pearl

the moon is stilled, the void is coffin-black

your thoughts likes seeds will scatter back to earth;

her eyes, her shape, the time you kissed her back.

We cannot get outside our time to see

not even light, near truth, can now be reached.

My mind, these lines, black rising rain can be

a medium for inky ghosts to speak.

The conjurer can block my teeming pen

But elements of life erupt again

Poem - Table

Table

An old table from the house squats in the garden now.

The wood has split, its sunshine yellow skin blackened

by bruising rain which falls and creeps within and finds

the sinews to plump and bow and leave a drunk face

against a fence looking on, its heartwood stopped.

There it crouches as if it waits to stretch and crack itself

to another shape, like the man of the house who knows

he must do something to wrest off the hunched muscle,

compacted by a life inside; as if it would walk to the window

and clack at the pane. A messenger strewn with old dead

spring catkins, awkward as an ex-partner at the door

at pick up time, and there it can see its replacement;

sleek and brown with a camber of exotic grain,

without stain and lying on soft carpeted floor.

Poem Raven

Raven

I knew a man whose face was set as rock

Those crags I climbed for tears in near darkness.

My father worked and worshipped at the clock.

His wife her inhibitions lost, her dress

Became a giveaway advertisement a crest

Attracting Gods, strangers to her life-long swim

Upstream with which to mate elude be pressed.

So bright your lives so more to make mine dim.

Presage Raven come sing to me in tones

to raise my bloods my vital signs my shroud.

Give me a mole to scurry for his bones

Exhume him blame him name Him in a crowd.

I dreamt she held me taught me how to feel

Inside me put a girder eye of steel

Poem - Cromer Beach

Cromer beach

 

First the clack of the flint skulls then

the scratch of the gravel displaced

finally obedient sand

where we walked easily together.

Behind I watched your steps compress

sand, pushing the water aside

the earth lighting your step lifting

you just my hand tethering you.

 

There at a boundary of blue

we watched a metallic mist come

I knew then you would be taken;

Tides are a clock counting down, up.

Our hands entwined a godless joke.

Our clambering children grown, gone.

Do not look for solace in this;

Do not look, back, forth, do not look.

 

 

James A Bullion September 2014

Poem - Just make it stop

Just make it stop

 

I am lost

My focus gone

Held like a spade

Earth coated tongue

Concrete blocking the way

Veins of my arms stiff brush strokes

 

Gin loosed pen

Musical sevenths

What gives when she

(patient as a snake), speaks lovingly?

I want my eyes out (my inner eye to see)

If I could just make it stop, tell the world

evenly

 

James A Bullion, September 14

Poem - The Edge

The Edge

I went beyond my boundary

into territory edging mine.

I crept through to leave no trace

to feel present, be primed.

 

Midnight called my 49^th year.

The trigger clicked back, I

Waited for your arrival here.

Crouched, breathing, in the black.

 

I need to lift a fever now

Having lived with it too long.

Comfort, hands in my pants, my

thumb in my mouth, pen gone.

 

A creature nears pearl eyes

serene on the woodland mist

Edging into the night a white paw.

With stoic dread I feed it wishes.

 

I am ready for first grey light

 

 

James A Bullion, June 2014

Poem - Quarry

Quarry

 

There is concrete and coal moving

The yellow trucks you had as a child

The air, birdless is choked on it

The sound is a grind of gears, a shriek

Of suspension, a doublet of knocking

As the unstoppable trucks lumber by.

 

Nearby a woman lays offered to the sky

Every part of her exposed and open on

The fertile earth. Naked on the green and

Gravel land where people walk on her

Strolling the path of her arms, her legs

To her womb where the sit and shelter

 

And hold fast to reach her eyes by stairs

And to her head finally to comprehend the

World from her prone prison below the sky

Ears choked with sound, burnt orange to

her smell and her mouth pressed closed

with chalk and rubble and a wire muzzle.

 

There is a lull of eerie expectant quiet

Before a sharp crackle and thud in the pit

Explodes the rock, raining fresh stones

Smoke rising and dust offering even cover,

People and the endless trucks still

Waiting for the dust to settle.

 

James A Bullion, May 2014

Poem - Summer Storm

Summer Storm

We lay together uncovered for the storm

Neither did we two confess our wakeful state

Heat pressed the silence gathered throughout the day

 

The pulse of light revealed the outline of forms

in love enough to incline and then to wait

for the growl boom accusing rattle of pane

 

slowly it builds, seizes the time and leaves us

morning comes, refreshed we two emerge its guests

 

James A Bullion, July 2014

Poem 2014 Centenary of War

2014 Centenary of War

I took a prayer candle from the church stained
with colour to the bright still evening and
made offering at the foot of a tree.
Veneration of a soldier and oak

Who can outlive the lives of men?

This tree.
What can shatter, splinter and still live?
Trees.
What aids platoon advancing?
Grove of trees.
Depicts men arms pleading to God?
Bare trees.
A temple for the fallen?
Thicket thorns.

I could kneel here for a thousand years bone
becoming stone decay, while the trees draw
sap, seed, and fall.  Men will still roam and fight
and tend and build in temporary steel
and stone and sorrowfully remember
the shelter of this wood where I sought life.

James A Bullion 4^th August 2014

Poem - Funeral

Funeral

For Alan Mackim

The arrival of the coffin is workmanlike

The breaking halting tribute voices hold

I look somewhere and see, really try.

The green vibrant moss

alive in the wood outside

bare branches, birdsong, nest, chatter.

At this gathering, connection

Hopping memory to mood.

A Draught of anger at life's achievement

As if we could rise above

this precise tightening futility

He was a man, real, regular, one.

Eulogy shaped a notice

to the difference he made, rehearsed

moving on, uplifted, without God.

Amongst the restless leaves,

cloying moss, damp, glistening, bacteria.

His furious energy his crucible

Man is water, gristle, sugar, electricity, no less.

At the gathering's end a surer voice

Not hope though, more measured

The bitter bark sits in the still squirrel’s mouth

I mark him, he me, together

we write the lines which will follow.

James Bullion v2 September 2013

Poem - Song for Harvest

Song for Harvest

 

My mother carries silence badly

What have I to say?

Desperate to bury this absurd poem

Words unearthing churn of hurt

Stitched from pieces of page scattered

in long since dormant notebooks.

 

Love is in the tender broad beans picked

plump as little kids.

Renewal rests in the rubbing off of garlic skins.

Dangers live in the dumb steel prongs

of the clumsy fork bayonetting spuds.

Chance will determine who comes out whole.

 

These are words written in the autumn

A song shared for the harvest. A thought

for the sprackle of dry-brown foliage

on the breeze, stronger than you imagined.

She is coming through the soil again, overwintering.

She’ll be there frozen in the new year for me to tend.

 

James A Bullion, July 2014

Poem - Man at a Window

Man at a window

His forehead resting on his forearm

Morning autumn sky leaking blue, pink

Trails of the high planes, silver lines

A perfect picture has been scored

With a knife

There are men in those machines

Where are they going?

What is it like for them, precisely?

The curled leaves on the grass, dead

Despite the effort of the dew,

Conjure fallen birds who can never unfold

Never prosper, being beyond fear and fall.

His fear is to turn around, face the life

Of the house, the war

Still in him allowed to pan back

Pushing him on, weaponless

James Bullion 14^th October 2012

Poem - Friend

Friend

To conclude I think this;

He is caught and guards himself

until he escapes into the dark,

grabbing his keys from the table.

But everywhere you go you hear memory.

So he flees but cannot go far

so he writes a note. To me I’m afraid.

The note from him contains a CD made for me

which I puzzle in my pocket on the way to work.

Driving late and fast I fizz it in. I overtake and listen.

Is that The Only Cowboy in Sweden –

singing about the rain?

Slowing, I remember to love him. Because I can.

They washed Roman soldiers outside the cities

when they came back bloodied and dirty from war.

They bathed them. Not their wives. Low women.

On behalf of the people. Before dawn.

What did Diocletian say to his crowd of men?

The waited, newly home, for the born sun to dry their skin.

I looked it up. It is this. ‘Now you have completed the unforgivable

for me, forgive yourselves. Do not wait for the enemy’s wounds to heal’.

I have left four messages for him. On the same lines.

James Bullion 28^th March 2013