Bridge jim hyde fast review 1 jul 2015

Bridge by Jim Hyde Sept 2015

5 Sep 2015



Every picture in these pages is an influence or trigger

for one of the poems in BRIDGE.


Coppicer A tree is gone in the forest that is us. The grove has new shadows and the river gaps unready. A moment or two then a young red deer stilts its way over rocks to the shore. Looking up to where you were, the doe sniffs and lifts her head. Waiting. Searching for me. I stand, step over dying rot of logs and look in her eyes. Nodding, we wait; air feathers leaves and the sun slows in falling between us. Under the points of one hoof you seed back. She waits then tips her eye at me shyly, a goddess of the field now unhidden. High-knee dainty she crosses back into time to let you grow. I kneel and cup and water you child sapling.




Lower Range Bed

You could forget me not a thousand ways if you wanted to tang, lemon, bitterroot, ginger rosewater, saffron, mace, clove gardenia, cats and saltwater a short roughness, slow taste velvet play forward sand dunes, oysters, wind jumping clouds, rockpools and shrieking each hour a petal vein body plucked through to dawn.



Mizzen

On the sea of nearsleep in your close-decked bed, ice-petrels cloud the topsls of my mind. I do not hear you, hummingbird at night land your tongue in my heart; tropical deep, 60 beats a second then flit on. Adrift ‘til you rise I return for your monsoon and belay - line equatorial green light at dawn cannon on the world.





Baal

A demon on my shoulder and a started flaming day. It’s riding me to smile like a panzer off to russia and all it wants to do is make me happy. I’m not like that. Give me hate and bile and greeneye acid envy. Make me boil in blood spray you with filth and drown in nightsoil loathing. The nails are not sharp but still it’s digging in, stealing. Where now my drain putrescence, rude mind pools and angry faecal lava? The feck thing’s changing me to a puppy sprawled in your arms. Damn this devil and its need my desperate lonely need for society.




Verità

for truth I have your eyes for lies I have my own high eagle over knave.



Affane, Co Waterford

Like Heaney but not with his hands I am digging in a land of dead stone and full-fleshed loams of remembrance. Above and about, old walls box up to pewtering sky and the one young rhododendron comfortably half through a wall. The church has its graves but no longer a god, abandoned to crows from a swifting revolution. Every month we trickle in, old relatives weekend immigrants and cyclists stopping by. We cut the grass with longingly felt incisions as under every larger plinth cool-eyed rabbits and voles root. Against my fingers new bones and small life sod on. Clouds cut in to dusk. Past my left eye, hand lurching up a fox jigs off stone, into rain.


Parthenon

I was dreaming of my father. Again a strange city, the roads not quite straight the buildings too wrong. He led me through. I followed, seeing, a man gone too long. His face was half-turned and at every corner I trailed his smile. Then he stopped. Ahead was the temple, or what was left of it. Column, gryphon, frieze and dark incense. He led me to the steps, looking back once. Going, he smiled and held out a hand. I waited, he turned and went in. Heart swelling, I awoke.



Lismore Books 2003

I once opened a shop where men came in unexpectedly and cried. Books in piles, too much daylight, dust beam anchorites & here they would stand, deserted and cry: the man now gone old, still full of beatings from 7 - Cappoquin convent-home a brother found high years after lost - bones thistle grey in a winter-stripped tree & a stoneface loser from Uniacke - undiagnosed or protected all his slavèd London life. I heard but did not record. The doors were new open I was present and, like everyone else aware. 2003 should have been a sudden Ard-Mhúsaem for a republic’s lives thrown so pointlessly away. But no. All I managed were a kind of listening an open space, some shelving and this remembering. You?


I Wrote This

I wrote this because you are my love, my life, my light my wedding day tomorrow and everything I am and more. Of course. But past the hall & down the stairs you’re hacking at something bloody tonight, and it’s scaly and noisy and not yet dead. I wrote this because you’re shouting and leaping and hacking and scaly and laughing out loud as you sing. The things you make me feel for tomorrow my dear, are confused but just for a moment. You’re here now, smiling. And bloody. Very bloody. The green bright of violence crawls off your hand as you touch my face to explain. Listening, I smile thinking wildly six hours yet ‘til dawn.











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Bridge jim hyde fast review 1 jul 2015