Oily Waters

1.
There is winter in the rain,
a quarter of the way
through a queer September.
It seems that life is a series of
washaway promises
and concrete disappointments.
Do you remember how you rescued me
the night our fifth child
turned one day old?
Late at night, you came to kidnap us…
We laughed
about my roommate
(the horrible golfing cocky’s wife)
all the long way back from Coleraine?
Just happy to be going home…
How did it ever happen, then,
that in those sixteen years,
the dry winds changed,
and now I have to pay a cocky
to rescue us from you?
2.
The rain stops suddenly in the night.
Now, it just hiccoughs its last cold sobs
onto the roofing iron.
A goose up the valley
squaaarks as though
its head might be trapped in a vice.
This week, two notable men are, suddenly, dead.
“Doing what they loved”…the commentators said.
But, isn’t that how we all die?
Doing what we love?
Living.
3.
Night, rain,
and a sea of blue and white.
Cotton can be so cold,
but soft and inviting when smudged,
disheveled, askew.
I dreamt of a blue and white batik
the night I realized you would leave.
Ever since, I’ve been waiting for a
blue and white sign:
like my brother,
walking the cliff-tops,
picking up crumpled papers
and hoping for a farewell note.
You wrote me no note.
You merely staged your own death.
It was not a pretty sight-
the corpse that was you
rolled in the soup,
your features eaten off
and tendrils of weed, strings of shell,
emerging from your pie-hole,
your empty eye-sockets
You staged your own death,
and, like Tom Sawyer,
you upstaged your own funeral,
while the cannons carried on blasting
over the oily waters of our lives.
4.
You cannot ever become tired of writing poems
under the rain.
And I think I know why it is.
The rain on the roof,
the titter-tatter of tiny tarsals
on the corrugations
(while, down below,
there is the warm, the dry, the blue and white cotton)
is a perfect construction of a poem
in common nouns.
5.
My time-
night.
And in bed,
I am at last in love
with solitude,
with hot milk and honey,
with the gurgle of the hot water heater.
I remember only vaguely
the night my daughters moved me up her
into this hayloft of a bedroom.
The night before, it had rained,
and a sluice of water
poured down inside my bedroom
all that long night.
I wondered if the ceiling might collapse.
So, I crept into a kind of large cupboard
and I tried not to see
the ugliness or the dust.
Now, two years later, I’m solid again-
no longer like that small island
in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel,
with a perfectly-gouged hole through its middle…