VAN GOGH’S SUNFLOWERS
Mom always wanted a copy of this painting.
Yellow, she said, was her favourite colour.
The golden sunflowers droop, full blown over the lip of the saffron vase,
Arching towards the olive tabletop.
Set against an icterine background,
The yellows are dull yet hopeful,
And stenciled in cerulean on the vase, a name:
Vincent.
----
THE PARTHENON MARBLES
I have not often contemplated eternity in a block of stone.
Scenes of glory and bloodshed,
Etched, erased and preserved by the hands of masters:
Sculptors, time, historians.
With Keats before me and millions after,
I write to create, to preserve.
And we hope that one day our work will be as precious.
----
UNTITLED
Zeus dominates the skyline,
His rod of lightning stretching every higher.
Poseidon rules in the Thames,
Quenching the thirst of the metropolis.
Hades blows his foul hot breath through the tunnels of the Underground.
----
CITY GIRL
“It took no practiced eye to see at a glance
that the Londoner was different…”
Sixty-seven years ago
These words were written about a time
Three-hundred and fifty years before.
Another time, an older age,
As true today as ever.
The Londoner is quick but unhurried,
Busy but not frantic.
She spends her leisure in the shops, in the streets, in the park –
Shopping, socializing, sunbathing – when the weather permits.
She is call, collected, cool,
Even in the face of the pushing, sultry, sweaty crowds aboard the evening Tube.
She has learned not just to survive, but how to live in her world of speed and quickness.
She is who I want to see in the mirror.
----
THE ENGLISH VOICE
The English voice
Is at once softer and more harsh than its American cousin.
Clipped consonants, rounded vowels,
The sound of eloquence to my untrained ears.
The sound of drama, conditioned by the BBC,
At once soothing and frightening,
Strange and familiar.
PORTRAIT OF AN UNKNOWN LADY
High on the wall
In a great gilt frame
She sits by her window,
Her raven hair curling over one bair shoulder.
Her gown of brown and blue is simple,
Different from the others Peter Lely has painted:
Barbara Palmer, the Countess of Castlemaine,
Frances Stewart, the Duchess of Richmond,
The mistresses of Charles the Second.
But her face is the same as theirs,
Her hair coiffed à la mode in Lely’s familiar style.
She could be Moll Davis or Nell Gwynne,
But there’s no way to tell –
Lely’s faces all look the same.
----
CAPTURED
A spiderweb.
An impassable labyrinth of asphalt and cobblestone.
It will reach you from across the world,
And pluck you out of your comfortable suburban life
And consume you.
Spires of steel, glass, and chrome,
The skyscrapers look soft against the jagged iron and Gothic sandstone of churches
and castles.
And fluttering over all, the Union Jack.
You will wander,
And just when you think you’ve found your way
You realize you’re lost.
Eventually you’ll get out,
And you’ll return home,
But you will never escape.
You will never be free.
----
EAST COAST LINE
Faster and faster,
Like magnets,
Pulling us forward in one long, straight line
Until we reach our destination,
Our destiny.
Pulling us inexorably forward,
And we cannot return.
The rail lines cross the country in every direction –
North, South, East, West –
And we travel blindly
Through space,
Through time,
Not knowing that we can never return to the exact place from whence we left.
Past the windows of the train,
Images flash:
Farms, villages, castles, the North Sea.
Slide projections of our lives,
Snapshots of memory
Seen for an instant and gone forever.
SHERWOOD FOREST
Dappled earthen floor,
Shadows in the shape of aspen and oak leaves.
This is a place of magic.
Robin and his merry men once ran here.
Still I hear their whispers
Echoed by the shifting branches overhead.
In a forest as old as the world
And green as anything,
Wet under an eternally gray sky,
I sip coffee and contemplate my own insignificance,
And the oak trees drop rainwater on my head.
----
Haiku Sequence
Sidewalk of Baker Street
Gum-splattered pavement,
All twenty-six shades of grey,
Sticking to my shoe.
On the Way to the Station
A touch on my head,
Unexpected in grey light:
Early morning bird poop.
Evening Tube
Warm bodies press close,
The humid breath of hundred
Fills the Underground.
Baker Street Station
The stench of years past
In Underground’s unmoving air –
Coal dust in my eye.
The Heath
Untouched for centuries,
Growing and green in the city,
Stretch of wilderness.
Waking Up
Laying in bed,
Hazy moon in the window.
Last day in London.
Numbered
The twelfth day of May,
Six pounds and seventeen steps,
Three rooms in 221B.
----
221B
Mecca in a three-room flat
Crammed impossibly full
Of reality mixed with dreams.
Tourists, worshippers, disciples
Cross the world to visit this place.
The table set for two--
Ignored in favor of the old violin
And the softly simmering test tubes on the table in the corner.
The smell of tobacco, formaldehyde, and rain
Has been smothered by the sell of cross trainers and perfume,
But the rooms remain untouched,
Everything in its rightful place,
Just as shrines are wont to be.
----
REALLY?
Is there really such a thing as reality?
Surely not here.
Not here where Robin ran,
Where Harry hunted,
Where Sherlock sleuthed.
These places,
I thought,
Existed only in stories.
----
TWO MONTHS LATER
The last night,
Standing on the corner of Marylborn and York Gate.
The sky overhead looked like water,
Blue and shaded, rippled by the wind.
Cars streamed by, red and white lights a blur in the darkness.
I tried to memorize every detail –
The cool evening breeze,
The way the air smells of grass and water and petrol,
The rushing silent sound of city traffic.
But even now it’s just a memory.
Was I ever really there?
