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Fiona Sampson

Four Poems

 

Moon Bandurria
-----For Julian
 

The night the sky refused to fly
dogs sang in darkness, bleached earth
lay in terraces round the hills, the screen door -
opening - set off a trail of echoes
shooting like stars across the desert.
The night the sky refused to fly
I was there. I was up in it,
my cool terrace slanting towards blackness,
tall night-ships sailing slowly west
across my forehead. These are the things we dream of
during shuttered days: the milk
throat of night pouring endlessly, soundlessly
and we, astonished at ourselves, touching it,
finding ourselves alive.
 
 


Siesta 
  

Tush-tush. Eyes fan black.

Look:
your skin burning coral and jet.

Lashes lift turn

                         fall
in the room's milky breath.

Dome of a cheek.

Peonies lying half-unwrapped, the paper's
blue.

Symmetry of presence
and space
breathing against each other

filling, emptying. Full.
 
 

 

In The Vault Of Sleep
 

Heat is not a straight line it is a vault
breaking away

opening
occupied space, a cosmosphere

for sleep voyages
heat's umbrella-wing thrust out

like your arm          that burning line
 

                  *

beyond skin the space of a skin      opening
flags opening in bright wind        roar of a clean engine

how to explain? how
the drag of space inward and out

(vacuumed flame)            the bird
flaming its wing flung

                                how summarise
 

                  *

the magnetism
between flame's root           its hair

that causal tension
closing               bird-flight            folded

and body-dense

the beautiful burn?
 
 

 

Nocturne in Blue and Black 
  

At dusk a jeep drives this way
its headlights passing through the small avenue of ash trees
business-like as cutlery on a blue plate.

Sky smudges the distance where the jeep merges
into blue dusk. The track under the headlights
is corrugated. The jeep black and business-like.

At dusk everything is black and blue,
bruised by autumn, rain, the long night to come.
The jeep rolls along the track like a china toy

and through the open window comes the smell of clay,
the lighter smell of drizzle in blue air.
The jeep passes black ash trees like forks

in the wide landscape. And the track is a knife,
dented and tarnished from over-use.
The jeep is small. Its headlights blacken the sky,

the track ahead and behind, the fields turning into sky.
Even their clay is black, the spring wheat blue
under black sky. Headlights clatter across it all,

starting a hare. Later there'll be lamping.
Behind the jeep ash trees shine in the drizzle.
The blue fields and the jeep go on into the sky.

 

Copyright (c) Fiona Sampson 2004. All rights reserved.


  
  

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