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EVANESCENCE

Ice in his eyes;

wind shuffled them like cards
but she remained the trick up his sleeve.

Salt on the tongue;

earth was mauve-veined
with the spilled wine of promises
forming mosaics as praise to Bacchus.

She preferred to paint
with the lifeblood of the rainbow;

the ice in his eyes
became an irritant
like sand beneath the nails,

the salt on their tongues
carried a gloom
whose threatening was unquenchable.

Like beavers
conspiring over the next act
of sabotage, they collided
in a dam of subllngual muttering;

the catch was in his voice,
a vocal trip-wire
spreading like antimony;

there was no time left to focus
on the strolling point
of an incurious star,

but there was a grace in possession,
and the comfort of realising
that it was all they would ever have.

ICELANDIC GOLGOTHA

"We are on the brink of a dozen deaths."
— Solzhenitsyn

Eskimos have no word for ice,
as we have no single term
for the experience of dying;
it is believed there are 3 phases —
resistance, life review, transcendence.
It would be interesting to know
if an animal feels this —
a tortoise, for example,
whose hibernation is disturbed
by rats riffling thro' his straw,
to rip at his flesh.

Slow moving, perhaps,
but that creature could retract
his head and limbs fast enough —
even if merely teased by leaf-tickle.
Yet the rats did not let him retreat.
They followed with greedy snouts
burrowing thro' shell-holes,
picking it as clean
as a sucked egg.

The rockery became Golgotha,
for it seemed pointless
to bury a disincarnate shell;
the wind would inherit it,
and gather there undisturbed
among Icelandic Moss and Hyssop.
Fire cracks into breaklight,
all words boasting hidden meaning;
but the Eskimos should invent
a word for ice,
as a transducer
of the motive into nature.

FLEECED

Into my palm
water troughs
and twists
through my fingers
like silk.

It strengthens the feeling
that everything flows,
the river still polishing pebbles,
with clouds in a shuck of sky,
succumbing to remembrance
in a place they have yet to find.

VIVIENNE FINCH

These poems are published with the permission of her husband, Geoff Brown

Some recollections and reminiscences on Vivienne Finch

Another poem by Vivienne Finch can be found at Aabye's Baby

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This page last updated: 3rd January 2005.