Poem
Peter Minter
BESIDES GOOD AND EVIL
BESIDES GOOD AND EVIL
BESIDES GOOD AND EVIL
i.Two days ago
you placed my hands in a pine field,
one dream beside the other
Where our lips, our broadening eyes
compost beneath a root of skin,
where our clothes fold up
Glow quietly through the earth
while the dry green field
we wake beside each morning
Falls dim with their memory.
Starlight absorbs into powder sky, clay
opens to cool like skulls
Blown into red flowers
on our shin blades, their spinnakers
driven into clouds, into rocks;
Flailing against the weight of your head
you rise &, like a Titan from sleep
doze still above your death,
Move forward into light
& stare undiminished from the window,
metropolitan furrows
Growing resinous
as hydrocarbon fall-out rouses
ex-nihilo flowers, spitfires
In the eucalypts’ trim. Such
coincidental similes forced gently
through cat shit
Thriving between
Newtown’s permaculture terraces
are most unlikely, being
All of earth & mortal nature
hung along a row of black clothes,
our bodies’ carbon silhouettes
Mud as dust in water.
You remember names for all the animals
& birds, sense balanced on line.
ii.
We speak about this later, garlic
mash and pomegranate
bled through the sinuous grain
Like hundreds of silver eyes
eaten crisp. This reminds me,
air had the scent of the visible
Day’s late sun, a faith
seed blown over Cow Hill
in a small eloquent gale
As a storm fell over the range
to our spines, blue
up against yellow grass ends
& grey tree cores rattling,
the blackberry flowers unheard but beginning
to witness the wind shake
Leaves from leaves, stones
from their buried life like feathers’
growing up
And away from the corn fields.
What was left to say, on the hill
nearer town
We found a few things
driven before us
whorled as the top of our heads
In a cold night wind
sparky with fire & thrash, our feet
wet & singing
The last, most beautiful return
as if it mattered. Morning air is clearer then,
the kids we are becoming
Quiet as a babble
like music
in the garden, wind-chime
Nerves split adrift
over the back yard’s first light—
free intricacy
Lets the fields lift easily
my hand in yours, thistles
peeling into space.
iii.
Take, Scamander, My Virginity
as if a river’s name
its moisture amidst syllables
Is marrow for the soul,
our sheaf craft borne across water
like the lung’s chaff seed
Flown off a dark lock
toward sea, where the light foot hears
you, almost twice
The water, best thing being
the way it falls
out of things, or into things
Again, tree sap
blooming into stars like a body
half ‘man’ half ‘fish’
Hovering over the cold lake
high in the mountain
or alluvial, sifted & infinitely fine.
In water we
come back to real work, the what is to be done
only partly revealed.
Salt crests on the tiller,
nets cast wide & fretless there
as waves
Ride along the eye
of Horizon, a boat named sheerly
for departure
& reaching out
toward the sweep of a green round island,
land spit
We triangulate rain, dew
river and sea,
falcon brain adjusting air strata
& tension to water’s
layered resistance—to speed
this wandering measure
Live through all this
material happening swift & honest
about us.
iv.
Later we land on a copse of fire,
feet doubling ash
where rocks glow plasmic in the rushes
Gleaming gold
where the highway’s empty wagons
melt as they rise
Over us
&, drawn in a tongue of salt
wet flames from the head
Eat flames between arm
pits, knee-joints, eye-brows pelvic
from the soil’s
Slow heat.
Skin’s hallucinate indivision
its red & green
Windfall of hair
burnt as the five flames at the end
of each hand
Go out across the land,
begin anywhere
& return, coiled hot
As ash,
embers quincunx
over pines.
Eyes seek their acrostics,
taste buds
definitive as a nerve’s
Sweet accidents
in hard roots returned to gather
dry
nets of plants.
By the hill
my syntax glows,
the world
radiates
its steady amplitude
on & off,
burns more deeply
in its waste
© 2005, Salt Publishing
From: blue grass
Publisher: Salt Publishing, Cambridge, UK
From: blue grass
Publisher: Salt Publishing, Cambridge, UK
Poems
Poems of Peter Minter
Close
BESIDES GOOD AND EVIL
i.Two days ago
you placed my hands in a pine field,
one dream beside the other
Where our lips, our broadening eyes
compost beneath a root of skin,
where our clothes fold up
Glow quietly through the earth
while the dry green field
we wake beside each morning
Falls dim with their memory.
Starlight absorbs into powder sky, clay
opens to cool like skulls
Blown into red flowers
on our shin blades, their spinnakers
driven into clouds, into rocks;
Flailing against the weight of your head
you rise &, like a Titan from sleep
doze still above your death,
Move forward into light
& stare undiminished from the window,
metropolitan furrows
Growing resinous
as hydrocarbon fall-out rouses
ex-nihilo flowers, spitfires
In the eucalypts’ trim. Such
coincidental similes forced gently
through cat shit
Thriving between
Newtown’s permaculture terraces
are most unlikely, being
All of earth & mortal nature
hung along a row of black clothes,
our bodies’ carbon silhouettes
Mud as dust in water.
You remember names for all the animals
& birds, sense balanced on line.
ii.
We speak about this later, garlic
mash and pomegranate
bled through the sinuous grain
Like hundreds of silver eyes
eaten crisp. This reminds me,
air had the scent of the visible
Day’s late sun, a faith
seed blown over Cow Hill
in a small eloquent gale
As a storm fell over the range
to our spines, blue
up against yellow grass ends
& grey tree cores rattling,
the blackberry flowers unheard but beginning
to witness the wind shake
Leaves from leaves, stones
from their buried life like feathers’
growing up
And away from the corn fields.
What was left to say, on the hill
nearer town
We found a few things
driven before us
whorled as the top of our heads
In a cold night wind
sparky with fire & thrash, our feet
wet & singing
The last, most beautiful return
as if it mattered. Morning air is clearer then,
the kids we are becoming
Quiet as a babble
like music
in the garden, wind-chime
Nerves split adrift
over the back yard’s first light—
free intricacy
Lets the fields lift easily
my hand in yours, thistles
peeling into space.
iii.
Take, Scamander, My Virginity
as if a river’s name
its moisture amidst syllables
Is marrow for the soul,
our sheaf craft borne across water
like the lung’s chaff seed
Flown off a dark lock
toward sea, where the light foot hears
you, almost twice
The water, best thing being
the way it falls
out of things, or into things
Again, tree sap
blooming into stars like a body
half ‘man’ half ‘fish’
Hovering over the cold lake
high in the mountain
or alluvial, sifted & infinitely fine.
In water we
come back to real work, the what is to be done
only partly revealed.
Salt crests on the tiller,
nets cast wide & fretless there
as waves
Ride along the eye
of Horizon, a boat named sheerly
for departure
& reaching out
toward the sweep of a green round island,
land spit
We triangulate rain, dew
river and sea,
falcon brain adjusting air strata
& tension to water’s
layered resistance—to speed
this wandering measure
Live through all this
material happening swift & honest
about us.
iv.
Later we land on a copse of fire,
feet doubling ash
where rocks glow plasmic in the rushes
Gleaming gold
where the highway’s empty wagons
melt as they rise
Over us
&, drawn in a tongue of salt
wet flames from the head
Eat flames between arm
pits, knee-joints, eye-brows pelvic
from the soil’s
Slow heat.
Skin’s hallucinate indivision
its red & green
Windfall of hair
burnt as the five flames at the end
of each hand
Go out across the land,
begin anywhere
& return, coiled hot
As ash,
embers quincunx
over pines.
Eyes seek their acrostics,
taste buds
definitive as a nerve’s
Sweet accidents
in hard roots returned to gather
dry
nets of plants.
By the hill
my syntax glows,
the world
radiates
its steady amplitude
on & off,
burns more deeply
in its waste
From: blue grass
BESIDES GOOD AND EVIL
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