You open the door, and find a new wing on the world.  Long, dim, silent, unexplored.  Doors opening on either hand in rows receding into a dusty dusk.  New vista's behind each; unseen before within the old.  (House of the Star that Sinned; Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

For Example

For Example

I would like to be a Dolomite tower

            And hear you say I mean the world to you.

Or, for example, I want to be the glistening

            Pilot fish of memory baring their skin.

Memory of sand in dunes, cliffs, or carved curves

            The sighing of the wind in long-needled pines.  

But, I am not, for example, replete with rugged good looks

            Or, for example, plenty of dead presidents.

I might, however, for example, pretend I had erudition

            Or reputation with words, bright wide awake apothegms.

Redolent with virile recall of macadam fields on

            Ascension Island in the equatorial Atlantic.

Or, for example, the Cocos, or Christmas, or Diego Garcia

            Far southern reaches where only radio aerials hum.

Or, I might for example, be a Foreign Legionnaire, in the

            Shattered aftermath of Dien Bien Phu,

Facing the Viet-Minh firing squad, a drooping cigarette

            In a fascinatingly crooked small smile.

While, for example, world and time away, you held your drink in

            Two hands in an obscure hotel bar, thinking of a husband.   

Hadassah

Hadassah

Hadassah, pearl of Persia

Woman from out of Asia

Alpine daughter, red and white

Early gray yet a smile so young.

May all your Khmer children

Gather round on warm evenings

Full with the on rushing tropical breeze

Bearing the fecund scent of paddi mud.

To share your time and words

With open mouths full of laughter

Days full of moments lush with loveliness

Beautiful with green and gray, evening clouds and grass.

Black and white, fine checks on

Unlikely tropical scarves among nasal

French and curves of Sanskrit on old stone

Temples among the wats and banyan trees. 

Hadassah, white orient pearl

May half an emperor’s kingdom be yours

And love fill the bowls at the feasts you give

And friends be many, fresh, and vibrant

Gathered from the four corners of the earth,

Out of the Seven Seas, blown to your shore

By the winds at the edges of the wide world

Drawn by the archangels of heaven to complete your company

To give glory to your God, and mine,

And complete the covering of the corner of his garment

Over you, O daughter of the East

O splendor of Iran. 

St. Andrew’s Sidewalk

There’s a linden tree

          A sapling in an old city

Springing to adolescent height

          In the midst of a circle of silica

Speckled black flecked gray granite flags

          Ordered stones stretching away

Into Hiberian fog

          To the right and to the left.

Tell me, my silver barked youth,

          My limber linden friend,

What thoughts of Scots love

          Have you sown in drifted silvan leaves

Into my sister’s wide blue eyes? 

As the Ruin Falls

All this flashy rhetoric about loving you
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love - a scholar's parrot may talk Greek -
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

C.S. Lewis - Poems.

SEA BEFORE THE RAIN

At the memory of trees
An image arrests
My far off eye.....

The island sky is dark
As the afternoon monsoon
Steams in from the hell hot
Surface of the Natuna sea.
White foam scalds the toes
Beneath the temporarily threatened
Equatorial eye in his height.
Coast sand scorches in an
Eternal white ribbon
Tying emerald fleshy jungle fringe
To silty grey brown ocean.
White and red and blue paint peal
From the high prowed fishing prahu
Beached to blister on the silica strand.

The fisherman’s chocolate leather
Skin bakes a deeper brown
Ancient eyes narrowed to the glare
Beneath the weathered rim
Cracked and pale palm fronds
Woven green and skillful by a
Loving woman’s hands, mother, wife, or
Daughter not far hence.
At rest before the rain, one hand upon
The forestem, one foot on the sand
The other tucked beneath him
A human heron in contemplation.

The rain comes on, soaring rushing wave
Soft black billows
Mounted on slanted silver spears
Plowing the wide salt field
With splashing white furrows.
And now the sand melts and runs
In plastic smoothness under this ocean in the air
And oven’s heat enough to
Warm old cold souls
Gives way before a child’s dream of
Breathtaking cool and laughing wet

Even old fishermen might dance.

Coffee Sunlight Spoons

Coffee sunlight spoons
You and me and macaroons
Conversation, intercourse, thoughts in air
How dark your hair is

Lorna Doone