I.
Clean clearwater sand
out beyond the rubble and shore-wrack

a thin stream
cutting its own bed as you diverted it
tiny sharp grains
on inside bends,
forking across plains

half a centimetre
in unmarked sand.

I asked my fader what the well was
that made a deep hollow gurgling in the sand
he picked me up and
under the thick mossy planks
an infinity of water
rushing under the beach to the sea.

II.
Pregnate
a hollow in the sands where the wispy
harsh grass

dusk gathered
a grey silent
depth over everything.

Sweaty summer night,
light taking years to fade

parents
out

III.
A hedge, all round,
with great trees. Ridges,
with the earth muddied from the watering and then dried,
splashes like clay,
with the green plants pushing out of it.
The hedge, and outside the great plain.

Across the rice-plain the raised road.

Looking down through the trees by the road,
the turn of the furrow, the man on the tractor
to far out on the plain, turns
and returns unendingly.

IV.
Amber mound,
frizz black, light
limbs displayed.

Bang the gong of
her delight.

In the green dawn
the thick tome in many tongues,
the pigeons.

V.
Silence, the
odour of clean sanitary arrangements,
the train-cries.

Pissing the piss of loneliness, the old
ripe brewery-smell through the window.

Silent student of the ways of men,
in bars, gazing at smoke-furred plyboard,
listening.

A weaseled little office-worker, ill-shaven, grey,
feet planted apart
mouth set in a sort of twisted irony
fatigue his alibi.

VI.
And so he tried to please them who despised each other,
his smiling white faces hither and thither
wet bat-wings against this rock, that wall

*

The sedge bowed down towards the sun
with the snow on it,
the sun melting it off
and breaking down the cells slowly.

*

The mountainside fierce with cherryblossoms
and the ground already flecked with them

the day already
rife with excuses

VII.
The rains have come and the river is full, and the souls of all the
little dead fishes carried down to dissolve in the great sea.

Dredging in the well
the wet fibres of leaf
droop over the fingers,
black fluid
descending to
black fluid.

Old glitter of darkness;
empty;
gaze.

Bang her gong.
He'll find the courage of his caution,
I wouldn't be in her shoes. Twenty years!

I wouldn't be in her shoes.

VIII.
Dim & green, with the damp air emanating

only the two troglodytes working at the low edge of the forest,
Mr and Mrs M. loading their small truck,
driving each other to the end in the dim air

and a bright rocket silver-yellow heavenwards,
airliner up in the last day there.

IX.
An eddy, a tumour
accreted round one's life as merely irritant

which dispersed, things to go on as they were.

I leak frequently
it interrupts my nights

A small mountain hut
in which to fade
(with peculiar inscriptions
in charcoal).

 

Copyright © Peter Makin, 2006.

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Peter Makin grew up in Lincolnshire, and was educated in London (with Eric Mottram). He lives in Japan, where he teaches and writes (Pound's Cantos: Johns Hopkins U.P.; Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse: OUP; [ed.] Basil Bunting on Poetry: Johns Hopkins U.P.). His long poem 'Hagoromo' appeared in issue 62.