On Fire
9 poems by
Michael Cope
 

Poetry

Rain
GHAAP
Scenes & Visions
Some Examples of
       Silence
for the time being
Crossing the Desert
back view
Other Poems
Song Lyrics
A Virtual Anthology
YouTube Poems
Cautionary Verses
On Fire



@ Contact
©  Copyright

These Repeated Images

If I could write in words that movement
glimpsed only  as a missing presence,
I would. You know I would.
Just as the last filament of sun lapses, I miss it;
and despite the expected renaissance tomorrow,
now the dark pinches over, the warmth flies.
Where did the presence go? Over the country
on remembered roads, on railway lines
where no trains have run since then?
These repeating telegraph-poles
whipping past, some with stick-nests,
these small towns where the grass is sand,
these shacks sunk in debris, these rows of walkers,
these bicycles, cars, trucks, garages floating by,
these animals, confined by wire,
these trains, these trains, these trains,
will it pass them, these repeated images,
paper, glass and wayside weeds, always,
changing and staying the same in memory,

these images – will it pass them, or will it stay

behind among them, or does it go there at all?
 

How will words meet presence? If I say you,
your eyes, your mouth, the way you walked
home from school, the trees, the hot road
steaming after rain, and the scent of it,
the flying-ants drawing frogs out in the day;
these repeated images, changing but the same,
if I say you, does it catch your
tale of rooms, similar but different,
rows of classrooms, lecture halls, offices,
shops in malls with lines of bright lights,
cars, driveways, roads of houses, shops, factories.
Will I find it among them? Where does it go?

Over the country on agate-smooth memories,

always shifting, threaded with sameness. Are the words

a rosary with flies of prayer confined in its amber,
unchanging for a million years, and if
I can read them, will they shrive and save me
or be only a circle of sounds, always
the same, and different
as the moment changes?
 

If I could write the poem for you, would I
follow it through market-roads, through
wards of hospitals, on silent pale wheels,
again and again through the same streets
in all seasons, at all times of day? If I can
more than glimpse its passing, its markers
of absence, its long hair brushed again
and again, its meals eaten, meals eaten.

Will I seize it, will it slide away?
Where will it go? Already I miss it as
the last string of sun falls
constantly as before, in a variation
on other sunsets, an amber mala
around our world. Now the dark comes
by stealth, the warmth flies.