Sometimes the sky seems solid: there are no thoughts; no words; no voice. Sometimes there seems to be no poet.
Aphonia
I have lost my voice.
The murmur of the traffic is enough
to drown the sound of my ideas. Star grit,
like broken oyster shells, embeds itself
in my soft palate and I choke
on smoky clouds as I aspire
to the feathered tops of pine trees.The moon dissolves,
a luminescent coughdrop,
liquid on my tongue.
I don’t suppose these giant orange poppies are indigenous to the UK, and I certainly can’t imagine they grew in the Forest of Arden, which once surrounded the area where the photo was taken.
Even so, the straggling clump by the gate of this traditional thatched cottage was utterly glorious and deserved a better photo than I could manage with my phone.
This morning when I went out I had my camera with me:
Is there a poet in the land
who can resist that moon, those stars,
who is not sitting, pen in hand
recounting how love leaves her scars?[…]
Enraptured by the moon’s bright light,
I, too, am writing poems tonight.
(Well, I was, some 15 years ago, which is when those lines originated as part of a tetrameter sonnet with heavy end stopping and extraordinarily unimaginative rhymes. The worst thing about learning more about poetry is that I try and write fewer bad poems and end up just writing less.)
With nicotine-stained fingers, she pushes aside
the net curtains of the clouds and stoops
to look through your bedroom window.
I become more and more dependent on my glasses, but even when I am wearing them, letters dance on the page – and they do so even more when the text is on the screen.
The following sprang from a misreading of a perfectly normal expression:
Phrases of the moon
A single quotation mark
opens the discourse, which swells
to a full-mouthed ‘O’, then fades;
a silver comma follows, and then
silence.
don't confuse the narrator 