things move around

Geese migrating in a swish of russet
     Break up in the distance like a wrack of smoke,
Announce the turn of seasons, videlicet:
     Brush with frosty breath the ripened cheek,
And etch expectancy into the air.
     Lingering mists whose chilly fingertips
          Quicken drowsy blood and prick the skin
Beshroud the inlet: dolent container ships
     Low out diapasons, shiver and respire.
     Breezes begin to winnow and bestir
          The forest canopy and floor; the rains begin.

To hear the jitter and skirr of squirrels,
     Inhale the acrid smell of leaf-mould,
Watch leaves pile up in brittle fascicles,
     And at an intersection, the exhaust enfold
An iron fire-hydrant like a sightless wraith;
     And then to feel the sun in a last spate
          Undo all omens in a honeyed gust
Of gold and burgundy, a flourish of faith;
     To see the horse-chestnut spill its fruit
     Amid the sidewalk-dreck, the mossed root
          Splitting the asphalt at your behest,

Autumn, is to know you, in your big-buttoned coat,
     Steaming and champing as you detrain -
Gasp of opening doors, hiss of heat -
     Buying coffee, unpeeling a tangerine,
Giving to the croak of old men in the park
     A rubric of oblique regretfulness,
          To the rush of soft shoes on paving slabs
The clement breathiness of a chinook,
     To the cough of cars the rough finesse
     With which you stiffen and bedew the grass,
          Caress cold railings with dew-decked webs.

A lulzy jaguar drifts belly-up,
occluding, momentarily, a car
with scarlet wheels and bilious green chassis;
a crazed macaw descends erumpently;
an elephant shields a llama on her lap
as past her shoulder bobs the jaguar.

Untoadlike, trippingly, a fumulus
condenses on the mirror. I recite
the one about the drunken sailor’s dream,
the blackbird one, the one about ice-cream:
words not worth thruppence, so much gnurr, and thus
words undisableable and apposite.

A wind so slow as to be a stillness
deposits us in a mist of must,
settles us deftly in the dullness

of the house’s husk; we come to rest
and in diurnal dusk begin our work:
ekeing toeholds, making anchors fast

in the vertex of lath and joist, the crook
of crumbled dado, in every crack inhuming
ourselves in the soft absorbent dark.

Epicene, we set about terraforming:
transmute dust into mould, mould
murk into form in the gloaming,

until in a nook a huddled fold
crowds putative and innocuous
and we have colonised a world

without photosynthetic fuss,
stirring sterility into fullness
inexorably. There’s no quelling us.

The byline photos in Accountancy magazine
are a spectacle of spectacles,
oval faces, soft hair graying and thinning,

foreheads with a glossy sheen,
anything but aesthetical.
Accountants have looked like this since the beginning:

look at the portrait of Pacioli,
eyes like tiny chips of opal, face jowly, doughy,
pale as a plucked fowl,

divining something secret and wholly
cogent in the weft of commerce. Why be showy?
he seems to say. Keep it under your cowl.

Dear santa, (not the one
who hails from Lapland
and is generally beloved,
but this simulacrum,
this plastic Garganta
on the roof opposite me),

you blaze in ways
unrecorded by apostles;
you pronounce, right arm raised,
your secular decree:
peace on earth through trade,
and beneficial impiety.

Streets lit with amber,
deciduous musk,
rustling of silhouettes.

In Stanley Park:
wet lumber
festooned with spiders’ webs.

September: sea-mists,
sunset a gust of amethyst,
the zinc-taste of oysters. Wistfulness

in the departure of freighters,
in their dolorous timbre.

We watch the float-plane tug and churn,
auklike, across the inlet,
and then, airborne,
hear its low drone; we see it turn and chug
up into a wet bank of fog,
and vanish,
my daughter and I,
today like any February day,

grey wake fading on the face of the water.
I put my daughter down
and watch her run along the seawall,
flailing at gulls,
laughing,
the cries of the birds bearing her away
irrevocably into the world,
today like any other day.

accumulated. Waking, I observed
the town brought low,
the mountains deified,
the firs weighed down with snow,
the kerbs preserved
as abstract forms, the merest guide

to where the road desisted, and the broad
escarpment reared
and soared
and softened to plateau:
an old and broken face, a beard
of snowy pine
in morning monochrome.

When the sun floods the plain
beneath a flint screed of cloud
and turns the mountains auburn,
and the railcars quiver in the yard,
and the town burns brown in the sun
under a grey carbolic sky,
a sky of streaked ochre and clay,
then an autumn day has begun;

and when the mountains yawn
purpleplum over the town,
silhouetted by the citrous sun,
and the railcars shiver in the yard,
and the plain is dark again,
dark as a dead abandoned dream,
dark as lead or blood or loam,
then a day in autumn is done.

Never really bothered keeping in touch
with mates from uni -
can’t say I think about Bob much,
or Will, or that puny bloke
I met in Irish lit., the one who spoke
with a phony fecker accent. What was his name?
I hung around with him all the same.

I barely think about old pals at all.
I changed my number:
I expect that’s why they don’t call.
Yes, I’m cool as a cucumber, getting
on with life, no time for internetting,
browsing through Friends Reunited,
witnessing my aloofness indicted.