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

Poem - You are heavy in her

You are heavy in her

Then with surprising agility she is a boxing hare

in retreat from you, her ghostly buck, conjured,

trying again to land a husband's blow.

‘His fists’, she pleads, ‘the bastard is back

in the room!’ As if you would upend chairs, vaporise

the remains of her life with oxy-acetylene eyes.

You, shipwright, who pounded her to pieces,

a fist of wages, kids. A blistering sulfurous arc

of marriage still burning, and you dead.

I sooth and set her drifting, distracted.

This is how she is with the tides of her days.

Then my voice, echo of yours, snaps her

to the grid anew, steals her away to years ago,

younger still. Again I am erased. She explains

waiting for your Fairey Albacore engine over

Kentish fields, follows every thudded detail

of your touchdown. Relieved, her eyes seethe,

with the seeds of interaction.  My arms form you 

around her, she squeezes. Her slug lips

spoon, lie together. Iron belief in the flow

of recollection with no end and no end.

James Bullion 28th March 2013

 

Poem - There had been a man in this bath

There had been a man in this bath

It measured the volume of you when you were gone,

red smears above red smears, broad water lines

like rock and crystal strata,

what came before and after. The picture

caught a calm pool where before there was

the spider of your four limbs flailing out, four carers arms

pushed in searching for control in the maelstrom of

water as if all we felt we needed was a stillness and

not a chaotic sprawl of a situation, clarifying, defining

creating actors, witnesses, narrators, disbelievers. 

I watched your spasms building shaking you free of your core. 

And the water out of control, elusive, lying to us.

I wanted to spring you from this calamity, not record

your curious black eyes darting at every shocking new

crush, your bashed frame twisted, twisted more,

knotted you, split you eventually snapping your power,

a shower of red sparks stained the white of your eyes.

Somewhere deep a thud in the pit of your stomach, 

a dropped weight opened emergency doors, emitted 

your red-brown juices into the foamy water from which you tried

to rise but then bombed when your heart finally gave out

and so did ours, in part.  We lifted you we raised you up

gargantuan wet dead spider of a man on to the rubber sheet. 

The two of us, professionally, spoke, of how

we would hold your absence and recall the clicks and suck, 

the tick of your mouth. The rhythm of your to and fro.

We washed you, more carefully than I would have thought,

and you were taken. Left, I took photographs I wrote

evidence. Now you are back there in the crumbling shale 

remains of the bath, in the thin layers of fissile memory. 

Your spring of life, rasp of your breath, breeze of your voice; 

your shy softways glance of eyes. 

James Bullion 28th March 2013