Reckless.

Evening gathers. Summer is gone.
I walk the city streets lost
To – oh
The broken glass breeze rips past cloth, and skin
To bone. And deeper still.
You kiss this way.
Not tender but brutal
Desire a starved beast
Whose hunger gnaws night after night
Within you
Without me.

Here, there, our ghosts haunt the alleys
By a withering enclave – a back-office exit
By the low row of cypress
Dipping their tips to drink a river
By a city laid below
Twinkling lamps and lives
Lined up – straight and narrow

Wrapped in night and each other.
One and alone to the world.

The river, like the clouds in the sky
And the blowing wind and the ebbing tide
Flows on, goes on

Time is nowhere.

September by Ted Hughes

A favourite and obscure poem.

September

We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.

It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.

We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads

Like an unfortunate King's and his Queen's
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.

Fall

For the last Friday we lost to a quirk of the Justinian calender and a long-winding drive to the moutains and down again. Home again. 'Time is nowhere.'

Fall

A secret

Can you keep it

To a whisper –

‘Here, sir’

Your warm breath

Climbs the window pane

As if a sudden mountain

Sprung from blizzard mist

You kiss as the breeze tugs the leaves

From the oak tree perched

Askew to the brokedown fence

Timber hollowed termite suburbs

Shrouded in red-yellow oak leaf

Teasing now. Oh it’s Autumn. March.

Fall.

Fall for me.

A secret

This private undoing and losing

Of ourselves

No explosions.

No forgettable blasts.

We shiver in deepening dusk

A suggestion of breeze

The first fall of leaves

In evening.