Two Poems

Oubliette

In the years of dark listening
to what lay between the seen and the said
I might catch a true thought

just as her mind forced it so far down
that it passed through the floor of herself
and into a black chamber.

She walked the surface
as if such thoughts might rise up
to display themselves – out of reach, in view.

There are things we say we never knew.
They are there far down where we cannot go
and so do not remember.

We are lock and key.
We are thought and chamber.

Out of All Cure

Little brother, do you remember the talking?
When we thought that life was time and space
and stayed up late to meet the dark with quotations.
We were young and had no wisdom of our own.

Lost in a mist, I cried out that I could see nothing.
The air cleared when I heard your voice:
Then open your eyes!
The last time we spoke, we allowed our true subject

had always been death – the unending ending
we described in terms of law and dimension
as if it were some kind of shell. This we found consoling
– the smaller existence, the smaller its ending.

Perhaps what really brought us peace was thinking side by side.
I look at your death: precipitous, continuous, unrealised.